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?
Context engineering has emerged as a primary lever for improving AI systems without parameter updates. Recent work showing that textual gradients do not function as real gradients motivates treating automatic prompt optimization (APO) as black-box search.
arXiv:2606. 07603v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) exhibit strong reasoning capabilities, yet most LLM-based agents are statically deployed and unable to improve through task interactions.
By Bowen Ren, Heyan Huang, Yinghao Li, Yang Gao
arXiv:2607. 29241v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Optimizing modern recommender models still depends heavily on engineers manually iterating over architectural, objective, and training-strategy changes.
By Haoran Ling, Yuecheng Li, Zeyu Song, Jing Yao, Shuwen Kang, Chi Lu, Wenjin Wu, Peng Jiang
arXiv:2607. 15524v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Under model--harness co-evolution, harnesses are not merely inference-time scaffolds but data-generating components whose execution traces can shape future foundation models.
By Hyunin Lee, Jinglue Xu, Jeffrey Seely, Donghyun Lee, Matei Zaharia, Yujin Tang
arXiv:2606. 04465v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: System prompt optimization improves agent behavior without modifying the underlying model, yielding human-readable, model-agnostic instructions.
By Wangcheng Tao, Han Wu, Weng-Fai Wong
arXiv:2602. 13769v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Automating heuristic design in complex, experiment-driven domains requires more than iterative mutation of solution algorithms.
By Qi Liu, Ruochen Hao, Can Li, Wanjing Ma
arXiv:2606. 07299v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Deep Research (DR) has emerged as a new agentic paradigm to tackle complex, open-ended research tasks, demanding systems that can iteratively frame problems, acquire evidence, verify sources, and synthesize long-form reports.
By Lingyong Yan, Can Xu, Yukun Zhao, Wenxuan Li, Qingyang Chen, Jiulong Wu, Wenli Song, Xiangnan Li, Weixian Shi, Yiqun Chen, Xuchen Ma, Yuchen Li, Jiashu Zhao, Shuaiqiang Wang, Jianmin Wu, Dawei Yin
Large Language Models (LLMs) have driven rapid progress in autonomous agents, yet standard evaluations remain confined to static task solving. An emerging frontier is harness evolution---the agent's capacity to autonomously optimize its own operating harness.
arXiv:2606. 07412v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: LLM-driven software engineering agents have become a central testbed for real-world language-model capability, yet their training remains limited by the availability of high-quality SWE tasks.
By Chuan Xiao, Zhengbo Jiao, Shaobo Wang, Wei Wang, Bing Zhao, Hu Wei, Linfeng Zhang, Lin Qu
arXiv:2608. 05628v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Although agent skills equip LLMs with reusable procedural knowledge, manual maintenance suffers from high costs, unscalability, and misalignment.
By Yuru Feng, Yaoqi Chen, Beidi Zhao, Qianxi Zhang, Xinjiang Wang, Jianan Lu, Zhirui Wang, Shusen Xu, Zengzhong Li, Qi Chen
arXiv:2608. 10424v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: A slew of recent works develop agents for solving research problems end-to-end, a paradigm increasingly referred to as autoresearch.
By Au Kwok Chun, Abhigyan Acherjee, Amrutha Rao, Zaiqian Chen, Kazem Meidani, C. Bayan Bruss, Micah Goldblum