arXiv AI

BONSAI: Evolvability-Guided Tree Search over Skills

arXiv:2608.

arXiv AI
Jun 11

Search Discipline for Long-Horizon Research Agents

arXiv:2606. 11522v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Autoresearch agents now propose, evaluate, and select scientific candidates against a metric, and that metric is usually an aggregate reduced over a heterogeneous space of regions, slices, or cohorts.

By Adithya Srinivasan, Devesh Paragiri
arXiv AI
Oct 16

SkillNEO: Non-Elitist Evolutionary Optimization of Agent Skills

SkillNEO introduces a non‑elitist evolutionary framework for refining agent skills, allowing lower‑reward versions to receive further edits and preserve useful partial repairs. By separating the selection of a version to use from the selection of versions to improve, the method identifies which steps to keep and which failures to fix, even revisiting earlier versions with new evidence. Experiments on 86 SkillsBench tasks across eight domains show significant reward gains for GPT‑5.4 Mini and substantial improvements when the evolved skills are reused by stronger models such as GPT‑5.5 and GPT‑5.6 Luna.

By Enze Ma, Chunyu Miao, Yankai Chen, Jie Yang, Liancheng Fang, Kening Zheng, Hanrong Zhang, Muyao Xu, Xinle Yu, Chengze Li, Wei-Chieh Huang, Ziwei Ren, Yunhao Du, Zhixiang Shen, Xue Liu, Philip S. Yu, Zhen Wang
arXiv AI
Oct 9

Who Verifies the Verifier? Co-Evolving Inspectable Graders with Self-Improving Agents

The paper introduces a method for co-evolving inspectable verifiers alongside self-improving agents. By synthesizing verifiers from clustered failures and selecting them based on agreement with a reference set, the authors demonstrate improved held‑out agreement on MBPP+ and outperform a bare LLM judge. They also show that removing anchor guards collapses the verifier into a vacuous grader, yet the collapsed verifier still trains skills effectively, indicating that downstream task scores cannot certify a self‑evolved verifier.

By Xing Zhang, Guanghui Wang, Yanwei Cui, Ziyuan Li, Wei Qiu, Bing Zhu, Peiyang He
arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 22

CHART: A Harness-Rotation Curriculum for Harness-Robust Search Agents

The paper introduces CHART, a curriculum that rotates harnesses during training to teach search agents parallel search strategies robustly across different harness configurations. Unlike static harness augmentation, CHART gradually consolidates behavior by graduating learned harnesses and replacing them, maintaining a reward gap that drives learning. Experiments show CHART enables agents to parallelize on 89% of held‑out harnesses, improves performance on a new QA task by 5.6pp, and benefits more from meta‑harness search than baselines.

By Xinlu Zhang, Ying-Chun Lin, Zhihan Zhang, Besnik Fetahu, Xi Chen
arXiv AI
Oct 26

EvoSkill v2: Fully Agentic Skill Evolution from Benchmark Adaptation to a Stateful Evolver

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 AI
Oct 1

MILO: Automated Harness Discovery via Orchestrated Multi-Agent Evolution

arXiv:2609.38349v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Modern agentic systems combine an AI model with a harness that controls execution and environmental interactions. Harness design strongly affects lon...

By Prithwish Jana, Mononito Goswami, Hao Liu, Xinyu Li, Langlin Huang, Zhehui Huang, Zhishen Huang, Patrick Bl\"obaum, Anoop Deoras, Purak Jain, Nikos Kanakaris, Sahika Genc
arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 30

AdaTutoRank: Learning to Rerank Document Sets via Adaptive Tutoring Optimization for RAG and Deep Research

AdaTutoRank introduces a setwise document reranker that uses Adaptive Tutoring Optimization (ATO) to provide graded supervision across nine rubric dimensions. By generating hint‑based silver labels, reinforcement rewards, and distillation cues tailored to each rollout’s quality, the method improves credit assignment for individual documents within a set. Experiments on ten benchmarks covering Retrieval‑Augmented Generation (RAG), deep research, and setwise evaluation show that AdaTutoRank achieves superior overall performance while reducing the number of retrieval calls.

By Kailin Jiang, Lei Liu, Jian Xi, Yangqi Chen, Hui Xu, Hongwei Zhao, Bin Li, Yu Lu, Haibo Shi