arXiv AI By Xin Xu, Ke Cheng, Hao Wang, Yangru Huang, Yanghao Xiao, Zhichao Chen, Zhisheng Zhong, Xun Liu, Yi Li, Qian Li, Haibin Lv, Jun Zhang, Jie Jiang, Zhouchen Lin

Drafting Agents, Not Just Tokens: Speculative Recursive Self-Improvement for Agentic Systems

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arXiv AI
1d ago

EvalResearchBench: Can AI Agents Build Their Own Feedback for Recursive Self-Improvement?

EvalResearchBench (ERB) is a benchmark that tests whether AI agents can autonomously design evaluation tasks for recursive self‑improvement. In ERB, a researcher agent selects or synthesizes tasks, builds graders, and refines them through pilot tests before producing a final evaluator that runs within fixed time and API budgets. Experiments with nine researchers and thirteen candidate models show that the best automated evaluators achieve about 75% concordance with target benchmarks, below the 91% ceiling set by target disagreements, and that human‑designed task samples still outperform many automated approaches.

By Yaolun Zhang, Tianyi Xu, Yujie Zhao, Jishen Zhao, Qingyun Wu, Huazheng Wang
arXiv AI
Oct 5

VERSE: Verified Self-Evolving Optimizer for Agent Harnesses

The paper introduces VERSE, a Verified Self‑Evolving optimizer that enhances LLM agent harnesses by allowing the optimizer to test edits, replay failures, and perturb steps while tracking fixes and regressions. VERSE builds its own tools for failure analysis, verification, training audits, and workflow control, and uses this feedback to revise the harness’s prompts, skills, tools, hooks, and notes without changing model weights. In experiments across five executors and multiple languages, VERSE improves all evaluated harness optimizers, achieving higher accuracy on held‑out and out‑of‑distribution tasks compared to the strongest baselines.

By Zekai Wang, Yingqiang Ge, Zekun Wang, Hai Wang, Yuhui Xu, Joshua Frandsen, Shancong Fu, Ashia C. Wilson, Chandan K. Reddy
arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 22

RRSI: Regularized Recursive Self-Improvement of Agent Harnesses

The paper introduces Regularized Recursive Self-Improvement of Agent Harnesses (RRSI), a method that applies regularization principles to the iterative editing of an LLM agent’s harness—prompts, control flow, tooling, memory, and context management. RRSI limits the number of edits per candidate, encourages novel trajectories, and uses a critic and pruner to filter out benchmark‑specific or ineffective changes, thereby favoring reusable agent mechanisms. Experiments on eight benchmarks show RRSI improves performance by up to 14.1 points on the training split and 4.7 points on out‑of‑distribution tests, while reducing policy token usage by 30% compared to unregularized evolution.

By Peng Xia, Rujun Han, Zifeng Wang, Yanfei Chen, Yufan Zhang, Yoonho Lee, Chengsong Huang, Han Yu, Zhongying CuiZhu, Yifei Ming, Huaxiu Yao, Burak Gokturk, Tomas Pfister, Chen-Yu Lee
arXiv AI
Aug 26

Exploit More, Explore Smarter for Budget-Constrained Agentic Search

The paper introduces ExTS, a tree‑search policy designed for budget‑constrained agentic search where evaluation and generation costs are high. ExTS treats expansion as a value‑of‑information decision, combining discriminative reward shaping, a stochastic virtual child, and quality‑conditioned branching to allocate budget more effectively. Experiments on prompt optimization, code generation, molecular structure elucidation, and agentic workflow optimization show ExTS matching or surpassing task‑specific baselines with an average gain of +5.5% using a single configuration, and the authors also present pilot‑run diagnostics to guide adaptation to different problem structures.

By Haoyang Fang, Bernie Wang