arXiv Machine Learning

ExpEvolve: Structuring and Reusing Experience for Open-Ended Discovery

ExpEvolve introduces idea-level extraction and control into evolutionary coding agents, enabling the discovery of high-level factors that explain differences in program performance. By leveraging these factors, the framework guides both exploitation of existing experience and exploration when progress stalls, leading to significant gains in sample efficiency and final performance. Across 11 open-ended mathematical tasks and additional benchmarks, ExpEvolve improves results by up to 5.0× and transfers benefits to other large language models and machine learning tasks.

arXiv AI
Jun 6

MLEvolve: A Self-Evolving Framework for Automated Machine Learning Algorithm Discovery

arXiv:2606. 06473v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large language model (LLM) agents are increasingly applied to long-horizon tasks such as scientific discovery and machine learning engineering (MLE), where sustained self-evolution becomes a key capability.

By Shangheng Du, Xiangchao Yan, Jinxin Shi, Zongsheng Cao, Shiyang Feng, Zichen Liang, Boyuan Sun, Tianshuo Peng, Yifan Zhou, Xin Li, Jie Zhou, Liang He, Bo Zhang, Lei Bai
arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 14

PACEvolve: Enabling Progress-Aware Consistent Evolution

The paper introduces PACEvolve, a framework that improves self‑evolving agents powered by Large Language Models by addressing their tendency to become trapped in local contexts and repeat flawed hypotheses. It does so through three techniques: Hierarchical Context Management to prune memory, Momentum‑Based Backtracking to escape local minima, and a self‑adaptive Collaborative Evolution policy to balance refinement and knowledge transfer. These methods enable the agents to maintain a global view of search momentum and achieve state‑of‑the‑art results on complex evolutionary benchmarks.

By Minghao Yan, Bo Peng, Benjamin Coleman, Ziqi Chen, Zhouhang Xie, Shuo Chen, Zhankui He, Noveen Sachdeva, Isabella Ye, Weili Wang, Chi Wang, Ed H. Chi, Fernando Pereira, Wang-Cheng Kang, Derek Zhiyuan Cheng, Beidou Wang
arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 25

EvoTreeNAD: Genealogy-Guided Evolution for LLM-Driven Neural Architecture Discovery

EvoTreeNAD is a genealogy‑guided evolutionary algorithm that autonomously discovers neural architectures without a predefined seed or search space. Starting from an empty root, it builds a persistent genealogy where each node represents a complete architecture; top‑percentile values from nodes and descendants steer lineage selection. The method combines an Idea Agent that proposes variants and a Code Agent that implements them, with theoretical analysis showing stationary variation regimes and empirical results demonstrating superior performance on CIFAR‑10/100 and MedMNIST‑v2 tasks.

By Lishan Yu, Derek Jiu, Qizhen Lan, Xiaoqian Jiang
arXiv AI
Jun 9

EvoMaster: A Foundational Evolving Agent Framework for Agentic Science at Scale

arXiv:2604. 17406v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: The convergence of large language models and agents is catalyzing a new era of scientific discovery: Agentic Science.

By Xinyu Zhu, Yuzhu Cai, Zexi Liu, Cheng Wang, Fengyang Li, Wenkai Jin, Wanxu Liu, Zehao Bing, Bingyang Zheng, Jingyi Chai, Shuo Tang, Rui Ye, Yuwen Du, Xianghe Pang, Yaxin Du, Tingjia Miao, Yuzhi Zhang, Ruoxue Liao, Zhaohan Ding, Linfeng Zhang, Yanfeng Wang, Weinan E, Siheng Chen
arXiv Machine Learning
Jul 7

MLS-Bench: A Holistic and Rigorous Assessment of AI Systems on Building Better AI

arXiv:2605. 08678v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Modern AI progress has been driven by ML methods that are generalizable across settings and scalable to larger regimes.

By Bohan Lyu, Yucheng Yang, Siqiao Huang, Jiaru Zhang, Qixin Xu, Xinghan Li, Xinyang Han, Yicheng Zhang, Huaqing Zhang, Runhan Huang, Kaicheng Yang, Zitao Chen, Wentao Guo, Junlin Yang, Xinyue Ai, Wenhao Chai, Yadi Cao, Ziran Yang, Kun Wang, Dapeng Jiang, Huan-ang Gao, Shange Tang, Chengshuai Shi, Simon S. Du, Max Simchowitz, Jiantao Jiao, Dawn Song, Chi Jin
arXiv Machine Learning
Oct 23

AgenticEvolve: Evolutionary Program Search with Persistent Language Model Agents that Design and Run Experiments

AgenticEvolve is an evolutionary program search framework that employs persistent large language model agents on each island. These agents not only generate candidate programs but also design and run experiments between evaluations. Compared to a version without experimentation (No-analysis) and other baselines, AgenticEvolve achieves higher quality programs on heuristic design tasks and recovers more ground‑truth equations on discovery problems, doing so with fewer evaluations and similar cost.

By Ze-Yu Peng, Qing-Yu Lan, Zhan-He Wang, Jun Zhang, Yun-Song Piao
arXiv AI
Jul 14

FIRE-Bench: Evaluating AI Agents on the Rediscovery of Scientific Insights

arXiv:2602. 02905v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Autonomous agents powered by large language models (LLMs) promise to accelerate scientific discovery end-to-end, but rigorously evaluating their capacity for verifiable discovery remains a central challenge.

By Zhen Wang, Fan Bai, Zhongyan Luo, Jinyan Su, Kaiser Sun, Xinle Yu, Jieyuan Liu, Kun Zhou, Claire Cardie, Mark Dredze, Zhiting Hu, Eric P. Xing