AI systems increasingly participate in their own improvement: revising their outputs, adapting their own harnesses during deployment, training on data they generate, and, increasingly, conducting AI research itself. This literature is described under a vocabulary ("self-refine," "self-reward," "self-play," "self-evolve") that conflates fundamentally different ambitions.
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:2607. 15524v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Under model--harness co-evolution, harnesses are not merely inference-time scaffolds but data-generating components whose execution traces can shape future foundation models.
By Hyunin Lee, Jinglue Xu, Jeffrey Seely, Donghyun Lee, Matei Zaharia, Yujin Tang
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:2608. 10157v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Self-improving agents seek to reduce the human engineering effort behind AI systems by enabling them to evolve and self-improve their performance over time.
By Vivek Kulkarni, Sudipta Paul, Aounon Kumar, Nicholas Tzou, Srinivas Chappidi
arXiv:2606. 20657v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Post-training a frontier model is normally weeks of human work: proposing data and recipe changes, launching runs, reading evals, deciding what to keep.
By Zhan Shi, Bing He, Yisi Sang, Hanqing Lu, Benoit Dumoulin
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
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:2607. 25152v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Long-running autonomous agents plan, act, and judge their own completion without human intervention.
By Hyundoo Park, Byungho Choi
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.
By Xing Zhang, Guanghui Wang, Yanwei Cui, Ziyuan Li, Wei Qiu, Bing Zhu, Peiyang He
arXiv:2606. 15363v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Self-improvement in AI agents has emerged as a key research frontier: systems that modify their own prompts, workflows, and decision rules based on accumulated operational experience.
By Ya-Chuan Chen, Tien-Jen Lai, Hsiang-Wei Hu
arXiv:2607. 17352v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Designing effective Lean proof agents is a central challenge in formal mathematical reasoning.
By Yuqing Li, Zeguan Wu, Yu Gan, Junyu Liu