arXiv AI

What Do AI Agents Actually Change? An Empirical Taxonomy of Mutation Patterns in Performance-Improving Pull Requests

arXiv:2607. 05666v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: AI coding agents are black boxes: we cannot inspect how they generate code, but we can inspect what they change.

arXiv Machine Learning
Jul 10

TTHE: Test-Time Harness Evolution

arXiv:2607. 08124v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The behavior of an LLM agent is determined not only by the underlying model, but also by its harness: the executable program that constructs context, invokes tools, verifies intermediate results, and recovers from failures.

By Jun Nie, Yonggang Zhang, Jun Song, Qianshu Cai, Dahai Yu, Yike Guo, Xinmei Tian, Bo Han
arXiv AI
Oct 12

Meta-Reflective Evolution Effectively Improves Production AI Systems

Meta-Reflective Evolution Effectively Improves Production AI Systems describes CoCoEvolve, an evolutionary optimizer that uses meta-reflection to retrieve evidence from the entire evolutionary history and probe live systems before proposing mutations. The approach is applied to data agents, LLM-powered data pipelines, and data engineering workflows, achieving state‑of‑the‑art results on DABStep, multiple LLM pipeline workloads, and data-eng-bench. Ablation studies confirm that each component of CoCoEvolve contributes to its performance gains.

By Seung Won Wilson Yoo, Chang Zeng, Aditi Somayajula, Sahithi Ankireddy, Rohan Kosalge, Avishree Khare, John Mitchell, Aditya G. Parameswaran, Rajhans Samdani, Anupam Datta
arXiv AI
Oct 28

The View from Nowhere: Population-Centered Agent Evolution

The paper introduces Population-Centered Evolution (PCE), a new principle for improving self‑improving AI agents by leveraging patterns of success, failure, and prior modifications across the entire population rather than focusing solely on selected parent agents. PCE distills task records and modification histories into a population block that guides enhancements to a chosen parent’s harness. Experiments show that PCE raises success rates on SWE‑bench Verified and Polyglot benchmarks, narrowing the gap between population coverage and best‑agent performance.

By Shuo Yan, Ningning Hou, Haoyu He, Haochen Pei, Shang Gao
arXiv AI
Aug 18

Evolving Ensemble of Agents

arXiv:2605. 09018v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We introduce the Evolving Ensemble of Agents (EvE), a decentralized framework that organizes existing, highly capable coding agents into a live, co-evolving system for algorithmic discovery.

By Zongmin Yu, Liu Yang
arXiv AI
Jul 22

Don't Blame the Large Language Model: How Agent Harness Evolution Shapes Coding Agent Quality

arXiv:2607. 03691v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Coding agents, autonomous systems that use large language models (LLMs) to resolve software engineering tasks, rely on agent harness: a middleware layer in between a developer and a large language model that orchestrates system prompts, tool execution, context management, and iterative reasoning loops.

By Oussama Ben Sghaier, Hao Li, Bram Adams, Ahmed E. Hassan
arXiv AI
Sep 4

Evolving Excellence: Automated Optimization of LLM-based Agents

The paper introduces ARTEMIS, a no-code evolutionary optimization platform that automatically tunes large language model (LLM) agents by jointly optimizing prompts, tool descriptions, and parameters using semantically-aware genetic operators. Starting from a benchmark script and natural language goals, ARTEMIS discovers configurable components, extracts performance signals from execution logs, and evolves configurations without architectural changes. Experiments on four agent systems show significant gains: a 13.6% increase in acceptance rate for the ALE Agent, a 10.1% performance boost for the Mini‑SWE Agent, a 36.9% token‑reduction for the CrewAI Agent, and a 22% accuracy improvement for the MathTales‑Teacher Agent using a smaller open‑source model.

By Paul Brookes, Vardan Voskanyan, Rafail Giavrimis, Matthew Truscott, Mina Ilieva, Chrystalla Pavlou, Alexandru Staicu, Manal Adham, Will Evers- Hood, Jingzhi Gong, Kejia Zhang, Matvey Fedoseev, Vishal Sharma, Roman Bauer, Zheng Wang, Hema Nair, Wei Jie, Tianhua Xu, Aurora Constantin, Leslie Kanthan, Michail Basios
arXiv AI
Oct 1

RankEvolve: A Reliable Multi-Agent Auto-Research Harness for Evolving Ranking Models

RankEvolve is an auto‑research framework that evolves generative ranking models by orchestrating multiple large‑language‑model coding agents through an Executable Operating Protocol (EOP). The system compiles a state machine that enforces phases, gates, branches, and loops, while a meta‑meta‑harness lets agents review and repair each other’s code. In budget‑matched experiments, heterogeneous composition of agents raised execution accuracy from 45.8 % to 62.5 % and reduced silent critical‑defect rates, achieving notable gains on the HSTU recommender and other benchmarks.

By Zheng Chen, Linfeng Liu, Hong Li, Hong Yan