arXiv AI

Neuroevolution Arena: Nested Ecological Evaluation of Update-and-Inheritance Regimes across Neural Architectures

arXiv:2608. 10323v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Competitive artificial-life systems can rank trained controllers differently under training and ecological evaluation.

arXiv AI
Jul 31

Living-Harness Is an Interactive-Agent Evolver

arXiv:2607. 26598v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large language model (LLM) agents may recover from a failure within an episode or after a retry, yet the same execution failure can recur in later tasks because post-episode feedback rarely revises the persistent harness that guides future interactions.

By Yuetian Du, Yucheng Wang, He Xu, Jiexu Xu, Shanwen Tan, Bing Zhao, Boyu Yang, Zhijie Xu, Ming Kong, Hu Wei, Jie Liu, Qiang Zhu
arXiv AI
Sep 17

Evolutionary Ensemble Search: Council-Guided Program Evolution with Persistent Memory

Evolutionary Ensemble Search (EES) is a framework that builds machine‑learning procedures through expert‑guided program evolution. A specialized council interprets task evidence and experimental results to generate structured search directions, which an orchestrator assigns to execution specialists and an evolutionary engine. The engine selects parents, diagnoses errors, and creates descendants via code mutation, pipeline edits, and crossover, with each child evaluated on its own validation evidence. Population archives preserve useful alternatives, and compatible predictions compete in a validation‑gated ensemble stage. Search adapts through parent‑relative operator credit, session memory, and lessons retrieved across runs. The system achieved medal‑threshold artifacts on 19 of 22 tasks (86.36 %) with 11 gold, five silver, and three bronze outcomes across diverse modalities.

By Juan P. Madrigal-Cianci, Eshan Chordia
arXiv AI
3d ago

Self-Evolving Harness on Multiple Tasks with the Agent as Its Own Optimizer

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 AI
Sep 4

Environment Evolution for Terminal Agents

The paper introduces "environment evolution," a method that incrementally raises the difficulty of interactive environments off‑policy, scheduling their generation across training generations to supply continuous learning signals. It derives three evolution directions tied to a multi‑turn learning objective and implements them via a loop‑engineered multi‑agent harness. Experiments with models such as Hy4 preview, Claude Opus 5, GPT‑5.6 Sol, Qwen3.6‑27B, and Qwen3.6‑35B‑A3B demonstrate that this approach consistently creates harder environments and boosts terminal‑agent performance on Terminal‑Bench 2.1 by 14.4–18.0 percentage points.

By Zhiyuan Fan, Tinghao Yu, Yuanjun Cai, Jiang Zhou, Jiangtao Guan, Jincheng Liu, Yun Yang, Dingxin Hu, Zhuo Han, Xing Wu, Feng Zhang, Lilin Wang
arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 25

EvoTreeNAD: Genealogy-Guided Evolution for LLM-Driven Neural Architecture Discovery

EvoTreeNAD is a genealogy‑guided evolutionary algorithm that autonomously discovers neural architectures without a predefined seed or search space. Starting from an empty root, it builds a persistent genealogy where each node represents a complete architecture; top‑percentile values from nodes and descendants steer lineage selection. The method combines an Idea Agent that proposes variants and a Code Agent that implements them, with theoretical analysis showing stationary variation regimes and empirical results demonstrating superior performance on CIFAR‑10/100 and MedMNIST‑v2 tasks.

By Lishan Yu, Derek Jiu, Qizhen Lan, Xiaoqian Jiang