SAGE: Multi-Agent Self-Evolution for LLM Reasoning
Authors: Yulin Peng, Xinxin Zhu, Chenxing Wei, Nianbo Zeng, Leilei Wang, Ying Tiffany He, F. Richard Yu
Organizations: College of Computer Science and Software Engineering, Shenzhen University, China · Guangdong Laboratory of Artificial Intelligence and Digital Economy (SZ), China · School of Information Technology, Carleton University, Canada
Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards improves reasoning in large language models (LLMs), but many methods still rely on large human-labeled datasets. While self-play reduces this dependency, it often lacks explicit planning and strong quality control, limiting stability in long-horizon multi-step reasoning. We present SAGE (Self-evolving Agents for Generalized reasoning Evolution), a closed-loop framework where four agents: Challenger, Planner, Solver, and Critic, co-evolve from a shared LLM backbone using only a small seed set. The Challenger continuously generates increasingly difficult tasks; the Planner converts each task into a structured multi-step plan; and the Solver follows the plan to produce an answer, whose correctness is determined by external verifiers. The Critic scores and filters both generated questions and plans to prevent curriculum drift and maintain training signal quality, enabling stable self-training. Across mathematics and code-generation benchmarks, SAGE delivers consistent gains across model scales, improving the Qwen-2.5-7B model by 8.9% on LiveCodeBench and 10.7% on OlympiadBench.
Figures & tables
Figure 1: Overview of the SAGE framework. Four specialized agents—Challenger, Planner, Solver, and Critic—interact through quality filtering and format validation to enable closed-loop self-evolution.
Figure 2: The SAGE training pipeline. (1) The Challenger generates questions from reference examples, filtered by the Critic for quality; (2) verified questions expand the dataset; (3) sampled questions are processed by the Planner and Solver to produce solutions; (4) all agents are jointly updated using Task-Relative REINFORCE++ with per-role advantage normalization.
Method
HEval+
MBPP+
LCB v1-5
GSM8K
Math
AI24
AI25
AMC
Olympiad
C Avg.
M Avg.
O Avg.
Qwen - 2.5 - 3B-Instruct
Base Model
68.3
60.6
12.0
84.6
60.4
3.3
6.7
40.0
28.0
46.9
37.2
40.4
AZR
68.9
61.4
15.0
81.2
62.4
3.3
3.3
35.0
28.9
48.4
35.7
39.9
MAE
68.3
61.1
15.9
82.2
65.8
3.3
3.3
32.5
32.5
48.4
36.6
40.5
SAGE
68.9
62.4
16.9
85.5
66.2
6.7
6.7
35.0
29.8
49.4
38.3
42.0
Qwen-2.5-7B-Instruct
Table 1: Main results on reasoning benchmarks. Comparison of post-training methods across three model scales. We report pass@1 accuracy (%) on code generation (HumanEval+, MBPP+, LiveCodeBench) and mathematical reasoning (GSM8K, MATH, AIME 2024, AIME 2025, AMC, and OlympiadBench). C Avg., M Avg., and O Avg. denote the mean scores over code, math, and all benchmarks. SAGE achieves the best overall performance across all three model backbones. Bold indicates best per LLM backbone.
Backbone
Method
ID Avg.
OOD Avg.
Qwen-2.5-3B
Base Model
68.4
18.0
AZR
68.5
17.1
MAE
69.4
17.5
SAGE
70.8
19.0
Qwen-2.5-7B
Base Model
76.3
24.6
AZR
77.4
27.4
Table 2: ID and OOD generalization comparison. SAGE consistently improves OOD performance (+4.2% on 7B) without sacrificing in-distribution accuracy.
Method
HEval+
MBPP+
LCB v1-5
GSM8K
Math
AI24
AI25
AMC
Olympiad
C Avg.
M Avg.
O Avg.
SAGE (full implementation)
68.9
62.4
16.9
85.5
66.2
6.7
6.7
35.0
29.8
49.4
38.3
42.0
SAGE (w/o challenger training)
66.5
61.3
9.0
86.7
65.5
0.0
3.3
35.0
28.0
45.6
36.4
39.5
SAGE (w/o solver training)
67.7
64.3
9.0
81.2
60.4
3.3
0.0
30.0
28.0
47.0
33.8
38.2
SAGE (w/o critic training)
66.5
53.7
14.1
86.0
65.9
3.3
6.7
40.0
27.4
44.8
38.2
40.4
Table 3: Ablation study of SAGE components on Qwen-2.5-3B. We evaluate the impact of removing individual agent training while keeping other components active.
Figure 3: Training dynamics on Qwen-2.5-3B. The Challenger steadily expands the question pool (bars) throughout training, while validation accuracy (line) reaches peak performance around step 100–120 before gradual decline, suggesting potential over-specialization on the self-generated curriculum.
Figure 4: Qualitative case study. The Challenger generates a math word problem, the Planner decomposes it into structured steps, the Solver executes the plan to produce the final answer, and the Critic provides quality scores for both the question and the plan.
Appendix figures & tables8 assets
Supplementary material from the paper’s appendix.
Appendix
Hyperparameter
Value
Training Configuration
Batch Size
128
Learning Rate
3×10−6
Training Steps
200
Generation Settings
Maximum Prompt Length
8192
Appendix
Table 4: Training Hyperparameters of our experiments.
Benchmark
Count
MATH ( Hendrycks et al., 2021a )
156
GSM8K ( Cobbe et al., 2021 )
148
HumanEval ( Chen et al., 2021 )
87
MBPP ( Austin et al., 2021 )
109
Total
500
Appendix
Table 5: Distribution of Training Samples Across Benchmarks
Figure 5: The prompt of the Challenger Agent.
Figure 6: The prompt of the planner Agent.
Figure 7: The prompt of the Solver Agent.
Figure 8: The prompt of the Critic Agent(question).
Figure 9: The prompt of the Critic Agent(plan).
Figure 10: The prompt of the Critic Agent(answer).
Recent advances in large language model (LLM) reasoning through reinforcement learning rely on annotated datasets for verifiable rewards, which may limit models' ability to surpass human-level performance. While self-play offers a promising alternative, prior methods yield only marginal or even negative gains on post-trained models because they generate problems that cluster around familiar concepts rather than discovering novel ones. We introduce Open-Ended Self-Improving Reasoner (OpenSIR), a self-play framework in which a single LLM alternates teacher and student roles to generate and solve novel problems without external verifiers or annotated data. Starting from a single seed problem, OpenSIR sustains open-ended exploration through diversity rewards that push the model toward unfamiliar concepts and difficulty calibration that keeps problems learnable. Across seven math benchmarks, OpenSIR consistently improves all models, averaging +3.6 points on instruction models and +3.1 on reasoning models, while recent self-play baselines yield marginal or even negative gains; starting from a single trivial seed, it also surpasses GRPO baselines trained on over 7K annotated examples. Despite training only on self-generated math, OpenSIR is the only self-play method that transfers to general reasoning, improving by at least +4.4 points on reasoning models.
Wai-Chung Kwan, Joshua Ong Jun Leang, Pavlos Vougiouklis +3
University of Edinburgh · Imperial College London · Huawei Technologies Research & Development (UK) Limited +1
Large Language Model (LLM) Agents, often trained with Reinforcement Learning (RL), are constrained by a dependency on human-curated data, limiting scalability and tethering AI to human knowledge. Existing self-evolution frameworks offer an alternative but are typically restricted by the model's inherent capabilities and single-round interactions, hindering the development of complex curricula involving tool use or dynamic reasoning. We introduce Agent0, a fully autonomous framework that evolves high-performing agents without external data through multi-step co-evolution and seamless tool integration. Agent0 establishes a symbiotic competition between two agents initialized from the same base LLM: a curriculum agent that proposes increasingly challenging frontier tasks, and an executor agent that learns to solve them. We integrate external tools to enhance the executor's problem-solving capacity; this improvement, in turn, pressures the curriculum agent to construct more complex, tool-aware tasks. Through this iterative process, Agent0 establishes a self-reinforcing cycle that continuously produces high-quality curricula. Empirically, Agent0 substantially boosts reasoning capabilities, improving the Qwen3-8B-Base model by 18% on mathematical reasoning and 24% on general reasoning benchmarks. Code is available at https://github.com/aiming-lab/Agent0.
Peng Xia, Kaide Zeng, Jiaqi Liu +5
UNC-Chapel Hill · Salesforce Research · Stanford University
Can a language model improve reasoning by learning from its own imperfect responses, without rewards or teacher-provided solutions? We present Self-evolving Post-Training (SePT), a simple method that alternates temperature-controlled self-generation with next-token likelihood training. Each round uses the updated model to generate new training responses, with one response per prompt by default and no correctness filtering. Across six mathematical benchmarks, SePT improves a temperature-selected no-training baseline by 11.4 and 6.7 AVG points on Qwen2.5-Math-7B and Qwen2.5-7B, respectively, where AVG averages Pass@1, Pass@8 and Pass@32 across benchmarks. We analyze how sampling temperature shapes the learning signal and investigate the value of the resulting responses. Responses from a SePT-trained model improve a student initialized from the original weights, while their reasoning prefixes help an unchanged model complete solutions, even when matched in length to prefixes from a colder initial model. Comparing next-token predictions at identical contexts also reveals changes in token rankings that decoding-temperature adjustment cannot reproduce. Further evaluations across nine starting models, general reasoning and code generation examine broader applicability. Together, these results show that reward-free self-training can improve both a model's predictions and the supervision it provides. Our code is available at https://github.com/ElementQi/SePT.
Mengqi Li, Lei Zhao, Anthony Man-Cho So +2
The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shenzhen · Shanghai Jiao Tong University · The Chinese University of Hong Kong