arXiv AI
Oct 15

Who Improves the Robot? Toward Physical Recursive Self-Improvement

arXiv:2610.18842v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Robots are increasingly autonomous in task execution, yet their improvement remains largely human-driven. This study investigates Physical Recursive Se...

By Hai Zhou, Fan Yang, Zeyi Chen, Lejun Zhang, Chenyang Fu, Jianping Li, Jiayi Zhu, Xianyang Liu, Yingxuan Yang, Lili Meng, Lu Wang, Xinyang Han, Jiankai Sun, Weirui Ye, Guanchu Wang, Wanhua Li, Ming Zhou, Boyi Li, Ming Jin, Kun Shao, Muhao Chen, Guang Chen, Lei Ma, Joey Tianyi Zhou, Costas Spanos, Xia Hu, Mac Schwager, Weinan Zhang, Qian Feng, Shangding Gu
arXiv AI
Oct 2

Agents Are Systems, Not Models: Rethinking Agentic Evaluation

The paper argues that evaluating agents as fixed models is insufficient, proposing instead to treat them as configurable systems. Using a new benchmark of four scientific tasks, the authors analyze how five configuration aspects—task information, reasoning, self‑verification, time budget, and backbone model—affect performance, noting that about 54% of outcome variance arises from run‑to‑run differences even with the same settings. The study finds that providing more task information has the strongest impact, while interactions among settings (e.g., extra time only helps with adequate information or model capability) and the choice of verification tools significantly shape agent behavior.

By Luis Wiedmann, Leander Girrbach, Cordelia Schmid, Zeynep Akata
arXiv Machine Learning
Oct 8

RSIGym: A Flexible Environment for Recursive Self-Improvement

RSIGym is a new agent-native research environment built on Everything as a Service (EaaS) that exposes training, inference, rollout, evaluation, and sandbox execution through reusable services. It supports shared budget and permission controls for Data, Harness, and Joint improvement tracks, allowing agents to investigate individual interventions and jointly optimize data, training settings, and execution harnesses within the same environment. Using RSIGym, the Opus 5 model achieved the highest RSI-Index of 0.4809 across five benchmarks, improving performance on software engineering, terminal interaction, mathematics, scientific reasoning, and skill-based tasks.

By Fanqing Meng, Lingxiao Du, Haocheng Lu, Qiguang Chen, Ziqi Zhao, Zijian Wu, Jiayuan Zhuo, Mengkang Hu, Michael Qizhe Shieh
arXiv AI
Oct 23

Toward Recursive Self-Improvement in Physical AI

The paper discusses recursive self‑improvement (RSI) in physical AI, where a system not only enhances its behavior but also the methods it uses to improve. It reviews how robot learning can evolve both capabilities and improvement processes, highlighting that gains persist only when feedback addresses remaining learning needs, the component can apply the change, the value survives task or hardware shifts, and practice remains safe and affordable. Current physical studies mainly show behavioral and procedural gains, but have not yet isolated recursive benefits, leading the authors to propose evaluation principles and future research directions for safely trial‑by‑trial self‑improvement.

By Meng Luo, Zechen Bai, Shanqing Xu, Yanlin Li, Kaixin Li, Mengchen Qian, Weifeng Lu, Ran Zhang, Yingtian Zou, Ziyang Luo, Wei Chen, Hongzhan Lin