EPOCH: An Agentic Protocol for Multi-Round System Optimization

As coding agents increasingly handle implementation, the central challenge shifts from building individual agents to building an infrastructure that systematically improves them. Current approaches optimize agent systems without accumulating transferable knowledge, accumulate knowledge without compositional reasoning over it, and lack a mechanism for that knowledge to self-evolve through operational evidence. MEGA (Meta Evaluation-Grounded Adaptation) addresses these gaps as a self-evolving infrastructure: each optimization cycle produces durable assets, compositional reasoning over those assets guides subsequent optimization, and operational evidence refines both the accumulated wisdom and the reasoning that governs it. Layer 1 distills reusable wisdom from agent sessions through behavioral-pattern clustering and empirical A/B validation, transforming each process into a durable asset. Layer 2 decomposes these assets into atomic PCR (Primary-Context-Resultant) units within a typed Wisdom Graph and performs deductive, abductive, and inductive reasoning to expand implicit relations; it then assembles context-specific execution plans through compositional retrieval that surfaces bridging knowledge unreachable by embedding similarity alone. Layer 3 performs multi-agent collaborative optimization over heterogeneous agent workflows (code nodes, LLM calls, and tool-using agents), attributing improvement effects to specific strategy changes through controlled evaluation that eliminates data variance. Evidence fed back from Layer 3 drives the self-evolution of both the curation strategies that govern wisdom composition and the optimization trajectories accumulated across runs. The result is an infrastructure in which optimizing an agent system and evolving the knowledge that guides optimization are one and the same process.

Self-improving autonomous agents are moving from research prototypes to deployed systems. The primary goal is controllable evolution, or adaptation, from experience with minimal or even no human input. This survey frames modern self-improving agents as adaptive systems that convert experience into accumulated capability gains. We offer a system-level framework that represents a modern agent as a configuration coupling a foundation model with an operational scaffold of prompts, memory, tools, and control logic. Within this framework, self-improvement is formalized as a self-induced update operator that obtains and commits updates to model parameters or scaffold components. We organize prior work by update target and by the signals that drive change, then review applications and discuss evaluation, before closing with open problems and future directions. For convenience, we track technical updates on https://github.com/selfimproving-agent/awesome-Self-Improving-Agents.

LLM-based agent systems can adapt by revising prompts, constructing tools, and changing other runtime resources. Managing these heterogeneous updates requires a shared lifecycle for identifying targets, assessing candidates, and retaining accepted versions, complementing communication protocols such as A2A and MCP. We introduce AUTOGENESIS PROTOCOL (AGP), which decouples what evolves from how updates are proposed. Its Resource Substrate Protocol Layer (RSPL) represents prompts, agents, tools, environments, and memory as protocol-registered resources with explicit state and versioned interfaces. Its Self-Evolution Protocol Layer (SEPL) specifies candidate proposal, assessment, and commit, with auditable histories and support for restoring retained resource states. We instantiate AGP in AUTOGENESIS SYSTEM (AGS), a self-evolving multi-agent system that retrieves, instantiates, and refines resources during execution. Across reasoning, tool-use, and coding benchmarks, AGS improves over its non-evolving configuration, and repeated reasoning runs report the accompanying output-token cost. Execution cases show a shared update lifecycle across all five resource types.