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.
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: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.
arXiv:2606. 05684v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: A central challenge for language agents is utilizing past experience to adapt to dynamic test-time conditions.
arXiv:2602. 13769v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Automating heuristic design in complex, experiment-driven domains requires more than iterative mutation of solution algorithms.
arXiv:2607. 08983v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: While autonomous coding agents have significantly advanced automated test generation, they remain fundamentally limited by lazy generation, a phenomenon where agents prematurely terminate tasks and systematically avoid complex programmatic logic, resulting in inadequate code coverage.
arXiv:2603. 18388v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Automatic prompt optimization (APO) has emerged as a powerful paradigm for improving LLM performance without manual prompt engineering.
arXiv:2607. 20668v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: TextGrad improves language-model systems by revising text from feedback.
arXiv:2606. 04465v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: System prompt optimization improves agent behavior without modifying the underlying model, yielding human-readable, model-agnostic instructions.
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:2608. 06329v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Task-oriented conversational agents are evaluated using curated or automatically generated benchmarks, yet benchmark quality is rarely assessed.
arXiv:2608. 10471v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Prompt optimizers automate the search for prompts that improve language-model performance, but existing methods rely on a predefined optimization procedure: the algorithm determines which candidates to explore and how the search progresses, while the language model generates or refines prompt proposals.
arXiv:2606. 04455v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Current AI benchmarks evaluate agents on task execution within human-designed workflows.