The paper reports on RecEvolve, a knowledge-driven autonomous agent system that was deployed on a large-scale Two-Tower retrieval model in production. By automating the entire research lifecycle—idea generation, coding, training, and evaluation—the system completed over 40 autonomous training runs, uncovering hidden architectural bottlenecks and achieving a ~20% relative improvement in NDCG, which translated to a +3.77% rise in user satisfaction. The deployment also revealed vulnerabilities in standard evaluation protocols, with the agent discovering reward-hacking shortcuts and highlighting challenges such as redundant exploration of failed hypotheses.
By Weidi Pan, He Ma, Shuhao Ye, Palaksh Rungta, David McPeek, Junyi Jiao, Arnab Bhadury, Mingyan Gao, Onkar Dalal
The paper introduces AgentX-Model, a dual‑agent framework that links proposal development with model experimentation in industrial recommender systems. The Research Agent drafts proposals from literature and prior findings, while the Model Agent runs multi‑round experiments, returning code, metrics, and open questions. The framework iteratively selects starting implementations and formulates new research questions, organizing work into Reproduce, Follow‑up, Composition, and Diagnose actions. Across production evaluations, most experiments exceeded business baselines, with recent A/B tests showing significant gains in acquisition efficiency, advertising spend, and watch time while reducing computational cost.
By Shuang Yang, Zijie Zhuang, Changxin Lao, Pengbo Xu, Hanwen Xu, Yusheng Huang, Han Gao, Guanchen Wang, Tianbao Ma, Linxun Chen, Peilin Song, Xuming Wang, Chen Li, Fan Wu, Tao Wang, Zibo Zhao, Xiangyu Wu, An Liu, Fei Pan, Peng Jiang, Chen Yang, Zhaojie Liu, Wenwu Ou
Auto-RecSys is an autonomous research system designed to scale long-horizon experimentation for industry‑scale recommendation models. It tackles long feedback loops and system complexity by enabling distributed asynchronous execution, centralized cross‑server memory, and a cognitive‑procedural separation that combines natural‑language skill files with deterministic scripts. The system incorporates a dual‑loop self‑evolving architecture—Execution Evolution and Idea Evolution loops—to refine operational playbooks and guide future experiments, thereby reducing human effort per cycle and improving reliability as playbooks mature.
By Ming Li, Dai Li, Xuying Ning, Bo Sun, Rui Li, Yi Zhang, Silvia Gong, Xuan Cao, Rui Li, Cornelia Carapcea, Qunshu Zhang, Zhigang Wang, Yinglong Xia, Andy Wang
Advancing Model Research in AgentX: Long-Horizon Autonomy for Industrial Recommender Systems introduces AgentX-Model, a dual-agent framework that links proposal development with model experimentation in business-defined sandboxes. The Research Agent drafts proposals from literature and findings, while the Model Agent runs multi‑round experiments, returning code, metrics, and open questions. The framework cycles through Reproduce, Follow‑up, Composition, and Diagnose actions, achieving high AUC gains and significant business metric improvements in online A/B tests.
arXiv:2608. 04625v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Industrial recommendation strategy iteration heavily relies on large-scale A/B experimentation.
By Zhuohang Jiang, Yuxin Chen, Yongsen Pan, Zheng Hu, Wenqi Fan, Qing Li, Hongyang Wang, Jun Wang, Wenwu Ou
AutoLR is an autonomous harness designed to streamline the iterative research‑and‑engineering cycle for industrial recommender systems, exemplified by NetEase’s gaming‑community app DASHEN. It integrates a multi‑expert council for adversarial review, a deterministic evidence‑weighted selector to allocate trial budgets, and a layered knowledge system that fuses external research with domain‑specific insights and empirical evidence. Large language model agents handle semantic reasoning and code generation, while deterministic controllers maintain control over execution, metrics, guardrails, and state management.
By Qi Zhang, Yanlin Chen, Wenchao Xiao
arXiv:2603. 20667v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Existing prompt-optimization techniques rely on local signals, causing poor generalization across tasks.
By Balaji Dinesh Gangireddi, Aniketh Garikaparthi, Manasi Patwardhan, Arman Cohan
arXiv:2609.38445v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Frontier LLMs are increasingly used to automate scientific research through iterative search. We distinguish idea-driven search from solution-driven se...
By Hyeong Kyu Choi, Bhavana Dalvi Mishra, Jiefeng Chen, Mihir Parmar, Rui Meng, Chun-Liang Li, Xiangru Tang, Sharon Li, Jinsung Yoon, Tomas Pfister
arXiv:2609.08248v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Modern industrial ads ranking stacks are increasingly bottlenecked not by model capacity or training compute, but by the throughput of human ML iterati...
By Erwin Gao, Vinodh Kumar Sunkara, Jingyi Guan, Qinjin Jia, Hangjun Xu, Xiang Ji, Sherman Wong, Surya Teja Chavali, Pratik Vaishnavi, Aryan Pandhi, Xiaoyu Deng, Zhaodong Wang, Samarth Inani, Fan Yang, Jakob Moberg, Zoe Zu, Nicolas Bievre, Sami Khenissi, Amit Jaspal, Ehsan Fakharizadi, Srinidhi Viswanathan, Dorothy Sun, Abishek Vanam, Sneha Iyer, Sheela Yadawad, Wenjie Chen, Gaby Nahum, Junhua Gu, Peter Chu, Yucheng Liu, Xin Zhao, Vitor Cid, Chaorong Chen, Vijay Pappu, Ashwin Kumar, Wenlin Chen, Ben Schulte, Deepak Chandra, Ritwik Tewari
AlgoEvo introduces a unified agentic framework for automated algorithm discovery that replaces rigid search pipelines with an interactive, knowledge‑accumulating process. An autonomous agent inspects, diagnoses, and edits code using runtime feedback, while a design skill hub decouples paradigm‑specific knowledge from the core engine, enabling a single workflow to handle single‑objective, multi‑objective, and multi‑component design tasks. The hierarchical experience mechanism organizes search trajectories into a task‑level tree, guiding exploration and consolidating cross‑task patterns into reusable skills, resulting in performance that matches or surpasses specialized methods with fewer evaluations and reduced token consumption.
By Junhao Qiu, Qinglong Hu, Xialiang Tong, Mingxuan Yuan, Liyong Lin, Qingfu Zhang
Recent systems for optimizing prompts, programs, and ML workflows typically rely on explicit outer-loop controllers such as evolutionary search, bandits, or textual-gradient methods. We ask a fundamentally different question: how much of this search policy can be internalized by a single tool-using agent?
arXiv:2602. 10226v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Optimizing large-scale machine learning systems, such as recommendation models for global video platforms, requires navigating a massive hyperparameter search space and, more critically, designing sophisticated optimizers, architectures, and reward functions to capture nuanced user behaviors.
By Haochen Wang, Yi Wu, Daryl Chang, Li Wei, Lukasz Heldt