arXiv:2606. 20002v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: This work presents a general framework for training large language models (LLMs) to "Connect the Dots" (CoD), a meta-capability required by long-lifecycle agents: as an LLM-based AI agent gets deployed in an environment, it solves a long sequence of tasks while continuously exploring the environment, learning from its own experiences, and iteratively self-updating its context about the environment, thereby achieving progressively better performance on future tasks conditioned on the updated context.
By Yanxi Chen, Weijie Shi, Yuexiang Xie, Boyi Hu, Yaliang Li, Bolin Ding, Jingren Zhou
RSI-Opt introduces Recursive Self-Improvement Optimizer Agents that evolve their own training policies by accumulating knowledge from previous runs, including prompts, playbooks, optimizer code, and decision cadences. A meta‑agent rewrites and archives these policies, enabling reusable procedures and code that adapt to new tasks. Across multiple generations and tasks, RSI‑Opt improves optimizer performance, achieving higher z‑scores on evolution suites, better cross‑model transfer, and significant error reductions on PDE benchmarks compared to fixed‑prompt baselines.
By Binghang Lu, Yige Sun, Guang Lin
The paper investigates reflective prompt optimization (GEPA) for a multi‑agent deep‑research language‑model, focusing on a topic‑disjoint train/validation/test split to avoid memorization. Across three random seeds, the optimized prompts improve held‑out citation reward from 0.702 to 0.781, with a 95% confidence interval of [0.051, 0.107]. The study shows that the gain is driven by decomposed per‑dimension feedback rather than a single scalar reward, and that the improvement persists even with an out‑of‑family verifier and a hand‑written version of the discovered recipe.
By Elias Lumer, Sahil Sen, Vamse Kumar Subbiah, Kevin Paul
This work presents a general framework for training large language models (LLMs) to "Connect the Dots" (CoD), a meta-capability required by long-lifecycle agents: as an LLM-based AI agent gets deployed in an environment, it solves a long sequence of tasks while continuously exploring the environment, learning from its own experiences, and iteratively self-updating its context about the environment, thereby achieving progressively better performance on future tasks conditioned on the updated context. Major components of the CoD framework include: (1) algorithm design and infrastructure for end-to-end reinforcement learning (RL) with long rollout sequences interleaving solve-task and update-context episodes; (2) tasks and environments for incentivizing and eliciting the targeted meta-capability in LLMs during training, as well as for faithfully measuring progress during evaluation.
Agentic ESOpt proposes using evolution strategies (ES) instead of reinforcement learning to fine‑tune large language‑model agents for long‑horizon tasks. ES offers model scalability, flexibility, and better long‑horizon credit assignment, enabling full‑parameter optimization with minimal GPU memory. The framework samples parameter perturbations, evaluates agents with rewards, and updates online, achieving notable performance gains on WebArena‑Lite and in test‑time prompt‑parameter co‑evolution.
By Zhi Zheng, Rongsheng Chen, Yunpeng Ba, Zhenkun Wang, Yee Whye Teh, Wee Sun Lee
arXiv:2609.35897v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: The pursuit of recursive self-improvement (RSI) toward general intelligence is divided between macro-level language model scaling and the interaction-d...
By Haomin Luo (University of Cambridge, Models2 AI)
arXiv:2603. 12109v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Reinforcement learning (RL) has become a de facto paradigm for building LLM-based agents that act, interact, and reason over extended task horizons.
By Deyu Zou, Yongqiang Chen, Fan Feng, Mufei Li, Pan Li, Yu Gong, James Cheng
arXiv:2607. 21971v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Test-time scaling through iterative self-evolution with environment feedback, as demonstrated by AlphaEvolve, shows remarkable performance gains.
By Shujin Wu, Cheng Qian, Xiusi Chen, Heng Ji
arXiv:2606. 04465v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: System prompt optimization improves agent behavior without modifying the underlying model, yielding human-readable, model-agnostic instructions.
By Wangcheng Tao, Han Wu, Weng-Fai Wong
The paper introduces the Agentic Compositional Generalization hypothesis, suggesting that reinforcement learning (RL) primarily refines high‑level decision‑making behaviors that orchestrate pre‑trained low‑level skills, rather than teaching new domain‑specific skills from scratch. It proposes River, a training recipe that enhances reward quality by filtering low‑quality synthetic environments and adding process‑level behavior regularization. Using River, RL‑trained agents outperform other open‑source 8B models on four terminal‑agent benchmarks, achieving significant gains with fewer than 30% of the training environments.
By Yihang Yao, Bo Pang, Xuan Phi Nguyen, Ding Zhao, Shafiq Joty, Semih Yavuz
arXiv:2605.28360v3 Announce Type: replace
Abstract: Automatic prompt optimization (APO) has driven significant gains in LLM-based agentic workflows. However, most existing methods treat each task's p...
By Jyotirmoy Nath, Neeraj Kumar, Brejesh Lall
The paper explores Retrospection-Only Fine-Tuning (ROFT), a method where a language-model agent improves its behavior by generating and training on explanations of its own experiences, without external teachers or reward signals. In software‑engineering tasks with Qwen3.5‑4B, ROFT achieves comparable or better solve rates than GRPO while requiring fewer updates and training time, and can learn from failures alone. Behavioral analysis shows ROFT indirectly assigns credit to actions and can produce shorter, more direct solutions when prompted to focus on direct solutions.