PRAXIS: Learning Dynamics of Self-Improving Models with Symbolic Archives
Organizations: Department of Computing Sciences Villanova University, Villanova, PA
Abstract
Self-improving learning systems adapt data selection, optimization, and auxiliary symbolic components, inducing nonstationary objectives outside standard learning assumptions. We introduce \textsc{PRAXIS}, a co-evolutionary framework that models generators, learners, and symbolic archives as interacting dynamical processes. We prove that KL-constrained generator updates and controlled archive-weight movement bound one-step objective drift, that archive updates suppress a program relative to any fixed comparator with a persistent cumulative utility advantage under sub-Gaussian noise, and that stochastic gradient descent achieves an average-stationarity guarantee whose degradation is governed by cumulative objective drift. Experiments across visual robustness, relational graph reasoning, and algorithmic graph reasoning exhibit generator stabilization, decreasing learner loss, and archive concentration consistent with these theoretical mechanisms.
Figures & tables
| Domain | Task scale | Train universes | Held-out universes |
|---|---|---|---|
| MIT Indoor | images | ||
| GraphLog | tasks / binary examples | ||
| CLRS | generated graph examples |
Appendix figures & tables2 assets
Supplementary material from the paper’s appendix.
Appendix
| Domain | Archive size | Program families |
|---|---|---|
| MIT Indoor | initial programs | ranking, threshold, symmetry, temporal, distributional |
| GraphLog | programs | constant, prior, descriptor, uncertainty-gated |
| CLRS | programs | algorithmic, local graph rule, reachability, sparsity, weighted prior |
| Domain | Method | Mean | Min | CVaR 10 | Std |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| MIT Indoor | ERM fixed | 0.678 | 0.617 | 0.630 | 0.029 |
| MIT Indoor | No archive | 0.658 | 0.574 | 0.618 | 0.038 |
| MIT Indoor | Frozen archive | 0.672 | 0.590 | 0.624 | 0.034 |
| MIT Indoor | Frozen generator | 0.661 | 0.589 | 0.603 | 0.031 |
| MIT Indoor | Full PRAXIS | 0.694 | 0.602 | 0.639 | 0.031 |
| GraphLog | ERM fixed | 0.718 | 0.429 | 0.429 | 0.282 |