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: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
arXiv:2607. 14004v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Most reported gains from agent-optimization methods are one-shot: an agent is optimized against a fixed benchmark and the resulting improvement is reported as if it were a stable property of the method.
By Wenxiao Wang, Priyatham Kattakinda, Soheil Feizi
arXiv:2608. 09629v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Self-evolving agents are usually built around prescribed optimization pipelines: the framework decides how to gather evidence, revise a persistent artifact, select candidates, and stop.
By Hui Xue, Fan Yang
arXiv:2609. 37968v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Advances in the coding capabilities of LLM agents allow them to inspect and modify their own instructions, tools, and execution procedures.
By Jungwoo Yang, In Jin Kong, Yohan Jo
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 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
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
EvoSkill v2 is a three‑agent system that edits the instructions (skills) given to an agent while keeping its model and harness unchanged. The system comprises a benchmark adaptor that turns user‑supplied benchmarks and graders into plugins, a solver that attempts tasks, and a stateful evolver that rewrites skills each epoch based on the solver’s training rollouts. Compared to existing skill optimizers, EvoSkill v2’s evolver uses a single coding agent with a bash tool, accepts every epoch’s skills, and allows multiple attempts per training task, achieving higher held‑out pass rates and lower cost per performance gain on SpreadsheetBench v2 and $ au^3$‑bench banking.
whyItMatters":"EvoSkill v2 demonstrates that a single, stateful evolver can more efficiently improve agent skills, enabling even less capable models to achieve significant performance gains in benchmark tasks."
By Dastin Huang, Baran Nama, Salaheddin Alzubi
arXiv:2608. 02636v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Self-evolving skill systems promise to improve agents by turning execution feedback into persistent skill updates without changing the underlying model.
By Yuxuan Liu, Zhaochen Su, Yuhao Zhang, Jiahe Guo, Zhongwei Xie, Huihao Jing, Lingyun Xie, Qing Zong, Yauwai Yim, Zhixiong Zhang, Haoran Li, Yangqiu Song
arXiv:2610.35434v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Recursive self-improvement (RSI), in which a system also improves the way it improves, is a long-standing aspiration on the path to AGI. Language agent...
By Wangcheng Tao, Zhanglu Yan, Han Wu, Weng-Fai Wong
R$^2$ Flow is a recursive self‑improvement framework for large‑language‑model agents that alternates policy learning, independent verification, and versioned skill‑library updates on a shared‑state orchestration graph. By merging histories that differ only in the order of independent steps, it pools evidence across equivalent executions and uses flow‑share readouts, signed utility ranks, verifier evidence, and residual‑variance plateaus to decide when and which skills to edit. Experiments on question answering, mathematical reasoning, interactive decision making, and code generation show that R$^2$ Flow improves task accuracy and library‑edit precision compared to heuristic orchestration, reinforcement learning, and other skill‑evolution baselines, and it transfers across different executors.
By Mingda Zhang, Qiang Huang, Yanjin Li, Zijia Wang, Qika Lin, Xiaoying Tang, Tiesunlong Shen