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
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
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. 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
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:2607. 22688v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Post-training agents for automated AI research requires optimizing not only model parameters, but also the runtime harness that shapes how research trajectories are generated, evaluated, and learned from.
By Zhengyu Chen, Teng Xiao, Huaisheng Zhu, Yige Yuan, Luan Zhang, Jingang Wang
The paper introduces iCoder-27B, a 27‑billion‑parameter model for RTL design and GPU kernel optimization that is developed through a recursive AI‑led process with minimal human input. Human experts provide high‑level objectives and reusable research skills, while the agent autonomously selects experiments, diagnoses outcomes, and refines training strategies, coordinating SFT, self‑distillation, and reinforcement learning. iCoder outperforms GPT‑5.5 and Claude‑Opus‑4.8 on several benchmarks, demonstrating the feasibility of building frontier‑competitive models with largely automated development.
By Cheng Yang, Jiayang Lyu, Shangyuan Liu, Guibin Zhang, Jiong Lin, Xinlei Yu, Junchi Yan, Shuicheng Yan, Weinan E, Linfeng Zhang, Linfeng Zhang, Qibing Ren
arXiv:2607. 21461v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Deep research requires agents to find answers that jointly satisfy multiple constraints.
By Shuqi Lu, Chaofan Li, Kun Luo, Zhang Zhang, Hui Wang, Hongwang Xiao, Zheng Liu, Lei Xiong, Jiahao Wang, Sen Wang, Xiyan Jiang, Wanli Li, Yuyang Hu, Hongjin Qian, Bingyu Yan, Ziyi Xia, Yingxia Shao, Kang Liu, Zhicheng Dou, Di He, Chaozhuo Li, Qiwei Ye, Zhongyuan Wang, Zheng Liu
Agent0 is a fully autonomous framework that enables large language model agents to evolve without external data by using a multi‑step co‑evolution process. It pits a curriculum agent against an executor agent, both derived from the same base LLM, where the curriculum agent creates increasingly challenging tasks and the executor learns to solve them. By integrating external tools into the executor’s workflow, the system creates a self‑reinforcing cycle that continuously generates high‑quality curricula, leading to significant gains in reasoning performance—an 18% improvement on mathematical reasoning and 24% on general reasoning for the Qwen3‑8B‑Base model.
By Peng Xia, Kaide Zeng, Jiaqi Liu, Can Qin, Fang Wu, Yiyang Zhou, Caiming Xiong, Huaxiu Yao
arXiv:2608. 10157v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Self-improving agents seek to reduce the human engineering effort behind AI systems by enabling them to evolve and self-improve their performance over time.
By Vivek Kulkarni, Sudipta Paul, Aounon Kumar, Nicholas Tzou, Srinivas Chappidi
arXiv:2608. 13951v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Scaling agent capability has largely focused on improving the model, yet an interactive agent acts through a runtime harness that mediates context, tools, control flow, and stopping.
By Tianyu Fan, Chao Huang
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