Agent self-evolution in long-horizon LLM systems is largely procedural: useful experience is not merely stored information, but reusable procedures for searching, debugging, and verification. Yet current evaluations do not isolate this form of transfer.
arXiv:2608. 15071v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Learning from experience is critical for developing capable, self-improving large language model (LLM) agents.
By Tianxin Wei, Zhan Shi, Minhua Lin, Bing He, Zewen Liu, Yisi Sang, Yuanchen Bei, Xuying Ning, Jiaru Zou, Ting-Wei Li, Xiao Lin, Yanjun Zhao, Chi Wang, Benoit Dumoulin, Dakuo Wang, Jingrui He, Hanqing Lu
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:2606. 17546v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Self-evolving LLM-based agents improve mainly by changing their agent harness: the structured execution layer around a base model, including prompts, memory, tools, middleware, runtime state, and the model-tool interaction loop.
By Congjie Zheng, Chuanyi Xue, Bin Liang, Jun Yang, Changshui Zhang
EVOHARNESSBENCH is a new benchmark that tests how LLM-based agents handle changes in their tool, skill, and agent harnesses over time. It includes 17 deterministic harness streams with 802 tasks, 520 tools, 42 skills, and 62 agents, and evaluates agents in two settings: deployment evaluation and self‑evolving adaptation evaluation. The study finds that harness expansion can cause forgetting, adaptation gains are inconsistent, and preserving old competence does not always aid new capability adaptation, highlighting harness evolution as a distinct challenge for agent development.
By Zixuan Ke, Vaidehi Patil, Haizhou Shi, Yang Li, Ye Liu, Sarath Shekkizhar, Anurag Koul, Jiayu Wang, Xuan Phi Nguyen, Semih Yavuz, Mohit Bansal, Shafiq Joty
arXiv:2609.24663v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Self-evolving agents convert interaction feedback into persistent artifacts, such as memories or skills, which in turn guide subsequent decisions. As t...
By Hongqiang Lin, Chao Liu, Xiaofan Bai, Xuan Jin, Yuhong Li, Nenggan Zheng, Xipeng Cao
arXiv:2609.04280v2 Announce Type: replace-cross
Abstract: Modern LLM-based agents operate through a harness of tools, reusable skills, and specialist agents that shapes what they observe and what the...
By Zixuan Ke, Vaidehi Patil, Haizhou Shi, Yang Li, Ye Liu, Sarath Shekkizhar, Anurag Koul, Jiayu Wang, Xuan Phi Nguyen, Semih Yavuz, Mohit Bansal, Shafiq Joty
arXiv:2606. 05684v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: A central challenge for language agents is utilizing past experience to adapt to dynamic test-time conditions.
By Yunxiang Zhang, Yiheng Li, Ali Payani, Lu Wang
arXiv:2608.28638v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Agent skills are portable packages of instructions and resources an agent consults at deployment. Self-evolving them fails in two ways today. First, sk...
By Jiale Liu, Pinze Ren, Yuqi Xia, Huan Wang, Zhenlin Zhao, Siming Dong
HarnessEvolve is a self‑evolving framework that improves agent harnesses—prompts, skills, tools, and execution logic—by learning from reference trajectories. It separates execution, evaluation, optimization, and gating into independent modules, addressing credit assignment failure, shortcut learning, and catastrophic forgetting. The approach uses reference trajectories to extract error signals, applies quality and performance gates to candidate updates, and validates updates on held‑out data, consistently outperforming state‑of‑the‑art baselines across diverse benchmarks.
By Wen Jiang, Mingmin Chu, Yimeng Tian, Qianxin Zhang, Haofei Yang, Rui Yang, Yang Liu, Tao Lv, Fangming Li
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
AREX-2 is a new approach that enhances the self‑improving ability of large language model agents by combining reflection—producing better solutions—and long‑horizon execution—maintaining effectiveness over many iterations. The method synthesizes improvement trajectories from machine‑learning and algorithmic programming tasks, providing verifiable feedback and sustained iteration. Trained on this data, an agent based on Qwen3.8‑27B achieves strong performance across multiple benchmarks and continues to improve as more iterative rounds are allowed.
By Hongjin Qian, Chaofan Li, Kun Luo, Wenqing Wei, Jianlyu Chen, Shuqi Lu, Yuyang Hu, Hongwang Xiao, Hui Wang, Chaozhuo Li, Qiwei Ye, Zhicheng Dou, Defu Lian, Zheng Liu