arXiv Computation and Language

AIBuildAI-2.5: Efficient Autonomous AI Model Development Through LLM-Guided Tree Search

arXiv AI
Aug 17

AI Research Preference Models

arXiv:2608. 13940v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: AI research agents (AIRA) can now propose, implement, and evaluate their own machine learning experiments, but progress on frontier tasks is throttled by cost: a candidate solution can be written in minutes, whereas evaluating it can take hours to days of GPU time.

By Thomas Simon Foster, Bassel Al Omari, Tingchen Fu, Thomas Mann, Carl Domond, Lucia Cipolina-Kun, Bhavul Gauri, Muna Aghamelu, Alexander D. Goldie, Eryk Helenowski, Jean-Christophe Gagnon-Audet, Alberto Pepe, Saba Nazir, Daniel Izcovich, Noam Levi, Rishi Hazra, Karen Hambardzumyan, Nicolas Baldwin, Xian Li, Martin Josifoski, Paris Giampouras, Masoud Jalili Sabet, Anya Sims, Hela Momand, Tatiana Shavrina, Despoina Magka, Jason Weston, Yulin Wang, Anirudh Goyal, Jo\~ao Henriques, Yoram Bachrach, Emily McMilin, Jakob Nicolaus Foerster
arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 23

Recursive self-improvement of AI research agents

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
arXiv AI
Sep 4

Evolving Excellence: Automated Optimization of LLM-based Agents

The paper introduces ARTEMIS, a no-code evolutionary optimization platform that automatically tunes large language model (LLM) agents by jointly optimizing prompts, tool descriptions, and parameters using semantically-aware genetic operators. Starting from a benchmark script and natural language goals, ARTEMIS discovers configurable components, extracts performance signals from execution logs, and evolves configurations without architectural changes. Experiments on four agent systems show significant gains: a 13.6% increase in acceptance rate for the ALE Agent, a 10.1% performance boost for the Mini‑SWE Agent, a 36.9% token‑reduction for the CrewAI Agent, and a 22% accuracy improvement for the MathTales‑Teacher Agent using a smaller open‑source model.

By Paul Brookes, Vardan Voskanyan, Rafail Giavrimis, Matthew Truscott, Mina Ilieva, Chrystalla Pavlou, Alexandru Staicu, Manal Adham, Will Evers- Hood, Jingzhi Gong, Kejia Zhang, Matvey Fedoseev, Vishal Sharma, Roman Bauer, Zheng Wang, Hema Nair, Wei Jie, Tianhua Xu, Aurora Constantin, Leslie Kanthan, Michail Basios
arXiv AI
Aug 26

Exploit More, Explore Smarter for Budget-Constrained Agentic Search

The paper introduces ExTS, a tree‑search policy designed for budget‑constrained agentic search where evaluation and generation costs are high. ExTS treats expansion as a value‑of‑information decision, combining discriminative reward shaping, a stochastic virtual child, and quality‑conditioned branching to allocate budget more effectively. Experiments on prompt optimization, code generation, molecular structure elucidation, and agentic workflow optimization show ExTS matching or surpassing task‑specific baselines with an average gain of +5.5% using a single configuration, and the authors also present pilot‑run diagnostics to guide adaptation to different problem structures.

By Haoyang Fang, Bernie Wang
arXiv AI
Jul 9

Cost-Effective Agent Harnesses for Abstract Reasoning and Generalization on ARC-AGI-1

arXiv:2607. 06764v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Recent progress on ARC-AGI-1 from disclosed architectures has come broadly from two regimes: heavy test-time compute over frontier models (evolutionary search, exhaustive sampling, extended chain-of-thought), or benchmark-specific training in which small models are fine-tuned on ARC data, often with task-specialized architectures.

By Kabir Moghe, Peter Chin
arXiv AI
3d ago

Agentick: A Unified Benchmark for General Sequential Decision-Making Agents

Agentick is a unified benchmark for sequential decision‑making agents that evaluates RL, LLM, VLM, hybrid, and human agents on 37 procedurally generated tasks across six capability categories, four difficulty levels, and five observation modalities via a single Gymnasium‑compatible interface. It includes a Coding API, oracle reference policies, pre‑built SFT datasets, a composable agent harness, and a live leaderboard. An evaluation of 27 configurations and over 90,000 episodes shows no single approach dominates, with GPT‑5 mini leading overall, PPO excelling in planning and multi‑agent tasks, and the reasoning harness boosting LLM performance by 3‑10×, while ASCII observations outperform natural language.

By Roger Creus Castanyer, Pablo Samuel Castro, Glen Berseth
arXiv AI
Jun 26

The Red Queen G\"odel Machine: Co-Evolving Agents and Their Evaluators

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