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. 08466v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Modern LLM agents are often improved by modifying prompts, tools, or workflows manually, while the executable scaffold surrounding the model---the \emph{harness}---is typically treated as a fixed artifact after deployment.
By Tailin Zhou
arXiv:2607. 05297v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Recent LLM agents tackle increasingly long-horizon, open-ended tasks, and external skills, reusable procedural knowledge supplied to the agent, further extend this capability.
By Zefeng Wang, Minxi Yan, Jinhe Bi, Sikuan Yan, Volker Tresp, Yunpu Ma
Meta$^n$ is a recursive self‑improvement framework for large language models that keeps a fixed meta‑operation Ω and repeatedly applies it to its own outputs, creating deeper layers that reason from higher perspectives. By avoiding changes to the meta‑operation, the system remains stable while the input grows, allowing depth to emerge through convergence and evolutionary search. Experiments on two backbone models show Meta$^n$ surpasses prior self‑improving agents across eight benchmark families, notably achieving positive scores on the ARC‑AGI‑2 benchmark designed to resist skill memorization.
By Zae Myung Kim, Young-Jun Lee, Seungyeon Jwa, Dongyeop Kang
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
The paper introduces Recuris, a recursive Experiential‑Working Memory architecture that lets long‑horizon agents track task progress and select skills based on current needs rather than full history. By coupling working memory with experiential memory, execution becomes structured evidence that localizes failures to specific memory components, enabling a bounded recursive memory‑evolution loop. Across four benchmarks and ten models, Recuris improves task success in 35 of 37 model‑benchmark pairs, raising state‑of‑the‑art performance on tau‑bench and SkillFlow and reducing common long‑horizon failures by up to 80%.
By Zhaochen Yu, Yingcheng Wu, Zhenfei Yin, Kaiyuan Chen, Zhe Zhao, Mengdi Wang, Shuicheng Yan, Ling Yang
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. 07545v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: An LLM agent's capability depends not only on model weights but on its harness: prompts, tools, skills, and control flow.
By Yifan Zhang, Yutong Dai, Juntao Tan, Luyu Yang, Rishi Mullur, Thai Hoang, Zhiyuan Hu, James Zhu, Phil Mui, Silvio Savarese, Ran Xu, Zeyuan Chen
The paper introduces a self‑evolving harness framework where a frozen language‑model agent first solves tasks and then edits its own harness based on run records. Using a 49‑line seed harness, the evolved harness improves average scores on in‑distribution benchmarks by 4.48 points and on out‑of‑distribution benchmarks by 12.64 points, surpassing Codex on the former and matching it on the latter. Continued evolution on a specific out‑of‑distribution benchmark further raises performance, and the study analyzes emergent mechanisms such as output truncation and history compaction.
By Qiankai Xu
arXiv:2608. 15071v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Learning from experience is critical for developing capable, self-improving large language model (LLM) agents.
By Tianxin Wei, Zhan Shi, Minhua Lin, Bing He, Zewen Liu, Yisi Sang, Yuanchen Bei, Xuying Ning, Jiaru Zou, Ting-Wei Li, Xiao Lin, Yanjun Zhao, Chi Wang, Benoit Dumoulin, Dakuo Wang, Jingrui He, Hanqing Lu
arXiv:2609.24289v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: As Large Language Model (LLM) agents are applied in continuously interactive environments, driving the evolution of their own capabilities becomes a co...
By Ruimin Pei, Yongkang Wu, Shangyi Zheng, Yaqing Zhang, Deyang Li, Jianjun Tao, Xinyu Zhang, Xiang Zhang
arXiv:2608.22533v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Autonomous computer-use agents are increasingly applied to long-horizon tasks requiring coordinated application calls, persistent state tracking, and v...
By Zheyuan Deng, Binghang Lu, Hanqi Feng, Shirley Huang, Dianzhuo Wang, Yuanda Xu, Zhiwei Zhang, Yige Sun, Changhong Mou, Runyu Zhang, Yuexing Hao, Barnabas Poczos, Xiaomin Li