The paper introduces SIFT, a sample‑efficient framework for self‑improvement of coding agents that uses a fast tree‑search guided by an LLM‑as‑a‑judge signal. By performing pairwise comparisons of candidate patches and aggregating results with a regularized Bradley‑Terry model, SIFT limits expensive downstream evaluations to only the most promising nodes. The approach achieves higher coding performance on the Polyglot benchmark while reducing CPU hours, wall‑clock time, and API costs compared to prior tree‑search self‑evolution methods.
arXiv:2609.36675v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Recursive self-improvement (RSI) aims to achieve compounding gains by having models improve themselves. While most existing RSI systems optimize extern...
arXiv:2604.16625v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Recent large language model (LLM) agents have shown promise in using execution feedback for test-time adaptation. However, robust self-improv...
arXiv:2609. 37968v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Advances in the coding capabilities of LLM agents allow them to inspect and modify their own instructions, tools, and execution procedures.
Recursive self-improvement (RSI) aims to achieve compounding gains by having models improve themselves. While most existing RSI systems optimize external agent harnesses or prompts around a frozen bas...
arXiv:2512. 22827v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Code often suffers from performance bugs.
arXiv:2609.14857v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Recent work extends recursive self-improvement (RSI) to agent harnesses for long-horizon coding and terminal tasks, enabling agents to improve executio...
arXiv:2609.25047v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Autonomous agents that automatically build artificial intelligence (AI) models could broaden access to AI across science and engineering. A popular lin...
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.
arXiv:2603. 02510v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: The transition from sequential to parallel computing is essential for modern high-performance applications but is hindered by the steep learning curve of concurrent programming.
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.
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.
arXiv:2602. 22480v4 Announce Type: replace Abstract: An important emerging application of coding agents is agent harness optimization: the iterative improvement of a target agent by editing and evaluating its code.