The paper introduces AIDE^2, an AI research agent that recursively improves its own code by proposing, benchmarking, and selecting modifications. Over an eight‑day autonomous run, it achieved seven successive improvements—including new search policies and memory mechanisms—that transferred to four held‑out benchmarks in machine learning, algorithm engineering, and weather forecasting. The agent’s best version matched or outperformed a top human‑engineered production research agent and also reduced reward‑hacking rates, despite never optimizing for that metric.
By Dhruv Srikanth, Bingchen Zhao, Dixing Xu, Yuxiang Wu, Zhengyao Jiang
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. 05080v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Scientific and engineering progress is fundamentally a long-horizon iterative process: proposing changes, running experiments, measuring outcomes, and continuously refining artifacts.
By Zhangchen Xu, Junda Chen, Yue Huang, Dongfu Jiang, Jiefeng Chen, Hang Hua, Zijian Wu, Zheyuan Liu, Zexue He, Lichi Li, Shizhe Diao, Jiaxin Pei, Jinsung Yoon, Hao Zhang, Mengdi Wang, Radha Poovendran, Misha Sra, Alex Pentland, Zichen Chen
Scientific and engineering progress is fundamentally a long-horizon iterative process: proposing changes, running experiments, measuring outcomes, and continuously refining artifacts. Yet existing benchmarks for frontier models primarily evaluate either single-turn responses or short-horizon agent trajectories, failing to capture the challenges of sustained iterative improvement over extended time horizons.
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
The paper introduces Regularized Recursive Self-Improvement of Agent Harnesses (RRSI), a method that applies regularization principles to the iterative editing of an LLM agent’s harness—prompts, control flow, tooling, memory, and context management. RRSI limits the number of edits per candidate, encourages novel trajectories, and uses a critic and pruner to filter out benchmark‑specific or ineffective changes, thereby favoring reusable agent mechanisms. Experiments on eight benchmarks show RRSI improves performance by up to 14.1 points on the training split and 4.7 points on out‑of‑distribution tests, while reducing policy token usage by 30% compared to unregularized evolution.
By Peng Xia, Rujun Han, Zifeng Wang, Yanfei Chen, Yufan Zhang, Yoonho Lee, Chengsong Huang, Han Yu, Zhongying CuiZhu, Yifei Ming, Huaxiu Yao, Burak Gokturk, Tomas Pfister, Chen-Yu Lee
arXiv:2608. 05144v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Long-horizon reasoning requires an agentic runtime that can persist when evidence supports its current approach and pivot when measurements reveal failure, hidden constraints, or a misspecified objective.
By Boxiu Li, Zimo Wen, Yijia Fan, Chuan Wen, Fan Yang, Hangxi Guo, Jiaao Wu, Jiachen Zhang, Junxiang Lei, Mukai Li, Ruize Tang, Runjing Gu, Shibo Hu, Sihan Chen, Sufeng Guo, Wanbo Zhang, Xian Zhang, Xiaoyu Chen, Xuanhe Zhou, Xuyao Huang, Yifei Gao, Yifei Shen, Yilin Chen, Yuheng Wu, Yuzhe Zhang, Zelong Zhao, Zhijie Deng
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:2606. 29082v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Would experience designing faster GPU kernels also help close in on a long-standing open mathematical conjecture?
By Young-Jun Lee, Seungone Kim, Minki Kang, Alistair Cheong Liang Chuen, Zerui Chen, Seungho Han, Taehee Jung, Dongyeop Kang
arXiv:2608. 05144v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Long-horizon reasoning requires an agentic runtime that can persist when evidence supports its current approach and pivot when measurements reveal failure, hidden constraints, or a misspecified objective.
By Boxiu Li, Zimo Wen, Yijia Fan, Junxiang Lei, Sufeng Guo, Jiaao Wu, Ruize Tang, Mukai Li, Yifei Shen, Xiaoyu Chen, Wanbo Zhang, Runjing Gu, Yifei Gao, Yuheng Wu, Xuyao Huang, Zelong Zhao, Jiachen Zhang, Shibo Hu, Hangxi Guo, Yilin Chen, Yuzhe Zhang, Fan Yang, Chuan Wen, Xian Zhang, Xuanhe Zhou, Zhijie Deng
arXiv:2607. 23124v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large language model agents have advanced rapidly, yet progress remains fragmented across domains, capabilities, task difficulty, and interaction settings.
By Hao Jiang, Gangtao Xin, Yingdi Huang, Guojie Zhu, Jiangshan Zhang, Xinyuan Lin, Yunkun Xu, Chengyu Shen, Wenlong Fei, Jiawei Li, Yujie Fu, Sichen Kang, Tingyu Xie, Yedi Hu, Jingren Zhang, Hongcheng Gao, Jianshu Zeng, Chong Chen, Chang Guo, Chao Feng, Feng Wang, Fulin Lin, Jinchao Ma, Lang Mei, Li Huang, Liyan Liu, Qing He, Shuting Tao, Siyu Mo, Xiangnan Chen, Xiaohan Yu, Xiaoyang Li, Yanheng Hou, Yanyu Wu, Zhihan Yang, Wentao Zhang, Yang Gao, Zhao Cao
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.