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)
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
ExplorationBench is a new benchmark designed to evaluate AI systems’ ability to conduct scientific exploration in verifiable alien worlds. It comprises two sandbox environments—AlienCode and AlienLogic—each containing discovery targets, tasks, flawed manuals, and tool‑call schemas that force systems to formulate hypotheses, design experiments, and iterate on results. Ten AI systems were tested, revealing that while the best performers can learn and apply unfamiliar rules, their progress varies across exploration trajectories and can even regress with continued exploration.
By Ming Zhang, Zhenghao Xiang, Peizhong Gao, Yujiong Shen, Yuhui Wang, Zhonghan Yue, Shihan Dou, Zhangyue Yin, Junjie Ye, Shichun Liu, Weihuang Zheng, Jiahao Chen, Jiayi Chen, Hongzhang Liu, Jiaqi Shao, Tao Gui, Qi Zhang, Xuanjing Huang, Suncong Zheng, Maxm Pan
ExplorationBench is a benchmark designed to evaluate AI systems’ ability to conduct scientific exploration in verifiable alien worlds, where rules are executable and can be precisely checked. It consists of two sandboxes—AlienCode and AlienLogic—each offering discovery targets, tasks, flawed manuals, environmental feedback, and tool‑call schemas. The benchmark tests whether systems can generate new hypotheses, design experiments, and iterate on results, rather than merely recalling pre‑trained knowledge, and finds that top performers can acquire and apply unfamiliar rules, though performance varies across exploration trajectories.
SPADE (Self-Play in Adaptive Synthetic Executable Environments) is a reinforcement‑learning framework where a single large language model acts as both an Environment Designer—creating executable, long‑horizon training environments—and a Reasoning Agent—learning to act within those environments. The framework uses a regret signal based on the difference between rewarded performance with and without privileged hints to guide the Designer toward environments that are challenging yet solvable. Experiments show that, when scaled to 30‑billion‑parameter models, SPADE outperforms fixed‑environment baselines by significant margins across math, science, code, and reasoning benchmarks, and improves tool‑use performance on BFCL‑v4 and ACEBench‑Agent.
whyItMatters":"By making environment design a learnable component, SPADE enables continuous self‑improvement and demonstrates that adaptive, self‑generated training environments can substantially boost language‑model performance across diverse tasks."
By Bo Liu, Simon Yu, Yiding Jiang, Ao Qu, Andrew Zhao, Zichen Liu, Junsu Kim, Zijian Zhou, Seungone Kim, Tongzheng Ren, Mickel Liu, Hanfei Yu, Zhaorun Chen, Weiyan Shi, Paul Pu Liang, Luke Zettlemoyer, Yejin Choi, Natasha Jaques
arXiv:2608.28638v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Agent skills are portable packages of instructions and resources an agent consults at deployment. Self-evolving them fails in two ways today. First, sk...
By Jiale Liu, Pinze Ren, Yuqi Xia, Huan Wang, Zhenlin Zhao, Siming Dong
arXiv:2609.37447v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: How strong can an AlphaZero-style chess system become under limited training compute when its entire learning loop is engineered for efficiency? We t...
By Bertil Braun
arXiv:2608. 06714v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: 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.
By Junbo Li, Boyi Liu, Canwen Xu, Yite Wang, Yuxiong He, Zhangyang Wang, Qiang Liu, Zhewei Yao
arXiv:2609.15364v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Digital agents must often adapt to new environments whose interfaces, tools, and failure modes are not fully captured by pretrained models. We introduc...
By Sibo Zhu, Shicheng Fan, Xinyue Wang, Wenyi Wu, Kun Zhou, Biwei Huang
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?
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:2605. 29796v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Agentic search enables LLMs to solve complex multi-hop questions through iterative reasoning and external search.
By Yunbo Tang, Chengyi Yang, Shiyu Liu, Zhishang Xiang, Zerui Chen, Qinggang Zhang, Jinsong Su