arXiv Machine Learning

LLM Evolution as an Industry-Scale Ecosystem: A Lifecycle Perspective on Continual Learning

arXiv:2606. 24901v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Continual learning capability is critical for Industrial LLMs, as deployed models must be continuously updated to meet evolving requirements and environments, rather than repeatedly retrained from scratch.

arXiv AI
Sep 23

ACLArena: Agent Continue Learning in Multi-stage Post-training

arXiv:2609.23989v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Building general-purpose agents for industrial deployment requires integrating multiple capabilities, each typically acquired at a distinct stage of tr...

By Haixin Wang, Xiaoxuan Wang, Junkai Zhang, Han Zhang, Renliang Sun, Alexander K Taylor, Yidan Shi, Haoran Deng, Chenguang Wang, Jason Cong, Yizhou Sun, Wei Wang
arXiv AI
Aug 7

Continual Learning in Transition

arXiv:2608. 06216v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Classical continual learning (CL) has primarily focused on enabling models to update and retain knowledge through parameter-centric mechanisms, e.

By Zhiyan Hou, Dan Zhang, Tao Feng, Liyuan Wang, Wei Li, Xiangzhao Hao, Hongyan An, Junfeng Fang, Haokai Ma, Zhaohui Xu, Haiyun Guo, Jinqiao Wang, Tat-Seng Chua
arXiv AI
Aug 20

Harness Continual Learning: Continual Adaptation Beyond Model Parameters

The paper introduces Harness Continual Learning (HCL), a paradigm where an agent’s state evolves through prompts, memories, tools, skills, and routing rules while keeping the underlying foundation model frozen. HCL defines harness-level forgetting and proposes a guarded evolution process involving a Continual Optimizer and Evaluator to ensure improvements without losing prior behavior. Experiments across textual reasoning, multimodal perception, and open‑world interaction show over 10% performance gains and demonstrate how the stability–plasticity trade‑off can be explicitly tuned.

By Borui Kang, Jinrui Gu, Junhan Lv, Wenbin Li, Lei Wang, Yang Gao
arXiv AI
Sep 25

Grow the Harness, Not the Context: From Strategy-Free Scaffolds to Reusable Specialist Agents

The paper introduces Growing Harness, a training method that transforms recurring control logic in large language model agents into reusable executable code, reducing reliance on the model for task-specific decisions. By using strategy-free scaffolds, failure-guided code repair, and success-first gating, the approach learns a shared harness that improves performance across multiple benchmarks and model sizes. Experiments on BrowseComp-Plus and WebArena-Verified show significant gains in success rates and substantial reductions in LLM calls and inference cost compared to traditional tool‑calling agents.

By Laizhen Li, Jiarui Li, Juanjuan Zhao, Kejiang Ye, Ye Li, Cheng-zhong Xu, Xitong Gao
arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 14

EvoHarnessBench: Can Your Agents Keep Pace with an Evolving Harness?

arXiv:2609.04280v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Modern LLM-based agents operate through a harness of tools, reusable skills, and specialist agents that shapes what they observe and what the...

By Zixuan Ke, Vaidehi Patil, Haizhou Shi, Yang Li, Ye Liu, Sarath Shekkizhar, Anurag Koul, Jiayu Wang, Xuan Phi Nguyen, Semih Yavuz, Mohit Bansal, Shafiq Joty
arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 7

EVOHARNESSBENCH: Can Your Agents Keep Pace with an Evolving Harness?

EVOHARNESSBENCH is a new benchmark that tests how LLM-based agents handle changes in their tool, skill, and agent harnesses over time. It includes 17 deterministic harness streams with 802 tasks, 520 tools, 42 skills, and 62 agents, and evaluates agents in two settings: deployment evaluation and self‑evolving adaptation evaluation. The study finds that harness expansion can cause forgetting, adaptation gains are inconsistent, and preserving old competence does not always aid new capability adaptation, highlighting harness evolution as a distinct challenge for agent development.

By Zixuan Ke, Vaidehi Patil, Haizhou Shi, Yang Li, Ye Liu, Sarath Shekkizhar, Anurag Koul, Jiayu Wang, Xuan Phi Nguyen, Semih Yavuz, Mohit Bansal, Shafiq Joty
Hugging Face Trending Papers
Aug 19

Harness Continual Learning: Continual Adaptation Beyond Model Parameters

The paper introduces Harness Continual Learning (HCL), a paradigm where an agent’s state evolves through prompts, memories, tools, skills, and routing rules while keeping the foundation model frozen. HCL defines harness-level forgetting and proposes guarded harness evolution with a Continual Optimizer and Evaluator to balance improvement, retention, and validity. Experiments across textual reasoning, multimodal perception, and open‑world interaction show over 10% performance gains and demonstrate explicit control over the stability–plasticity trade‑off.

arXiv Machine Learning
Aug 7

EvoHarness-RL: Learning Self-Evolving Runtime Harness for Long-Horizon LLM Agents

arXiv:2608. 05446v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Long-horizon LLM agents increasingly rely on external execution support to maintain state, track progress, invoke tools, verify outcomes, and reuse experience across interactions.

By Xuying Ning, Dongqi Fu, Tianxin Wei, Hanqing Zeng, Yuanchen Bei, Bingxuan Li, Zihao Li, Qifan Wang, Xiang Shen, Yifan Wu, Jiayi Liu, Hong Li, Yinglong Xia, Xiangjun Fan, Hanghang Tong, Jingrui He
Hugging Face Trending Papers
Jun 18

Connect the Dots: Training LLMs for Long-Lifecycle Agents with Cross-Domain Generalization Via Reinforcement Learning

This work presents a general framework for training large language models (LLMs) to "Connect the Dots" (CoD), a meta-capability required by long-lifecycle agents: as an LLM-based AI agent gets deployed in an environment, it solves a long sequence of tasks while continuously exploring the environment, learning from its own experiences, and iteratively self-updating its context about the environment, thereby achieving progressively better performance on future tasks conditioned on the updated context. Major components of the CoD framework include: (1) algorithm design and infrastructure for end-to-end reinforcement learning (RL) with long rollout sequences interleaving solve-task and update-context episodes; (2) tasks and environments for incentivizing and eliciting the targeted meta-capability in LLMs during training, as well as for faithfully measuring progress during evaluation.

arXiv AI
Jun 17

Position: Modular Memory is the Key to Continual Learning Agents

arXiv:2603. 01761v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Foundation models have transformed machine learning through large-scale pretraining and increased test-time compute.

By Vaggelis Dorovatas, Malte Schwerin, Andrew D. Bagdanov, Lucas Caccia, Antonio Carta, Laurent Charlin, Barbara Hammer, Tyler L. Hayes, Timm Hess, Christopher Kanan, Dhireesha Kudithipudi, Xialei Liu, Vincenzo Lomonaco, Jorge Mendez-Mendez, Darshan Patil, Ameya Prabhu, Elisa Ricci, Tinne Tuytelaars, Gido M. van de Ven, Liyuan Wang, Joost van de Weijer, Jonghyun Choi, Martin Mundt, Rahaf Aljundi