EvoProbe: Evaluation-Driven Benchmark Evolution for LLM Agents

Agent self-evolution in long-horizon LLM systems is largely procedural: useful experience is not merely stored information, but reusable procedures for searching, debugging, and verification. Yet current evaluations do not isolate this form of transfer. Agent benchmarks test single-episode task solving; memory benchmarks target information retention rather than procedural reuse. We introduce EvoAgentBench, a benchmark for agent self-evolution via Ability-guided transfer across four agentic domains: web research, algorithmic reasoning, software engineering, and knowledge work. EvoAgentBench extracts trace-grounded Abilities from agent executions, canonicalizes them into operational units, and builds domain-specific Ability Graphs linking tasks that share procedural overlap. By design, every test task is backed by verified training-side Ability support. Across a 528/267 train/test split, two scaffolds, and three backbones, curated Ability content transfers reliably across model families, but no current automatic method sustains positive gain in all settings. EvoAgentBench shifts self-evolution evaluation from aggregate accuracy comparison to fine-grained diagnosis of experience encoding, routing, and uptake. The benchmark is publicly available at https://huggingface.co/datasets/EverMind-AI/EvoAgentBench.

Large language model (LLM) agents are increasingly used for long-horizon research and engineering, yet evaluating these capabilities remains expensive, time-consuming, and heavily dependent on human expertise. This motivates a natural question: can LLM agents themselves construct efficient benchmarks that preserve the conclusions of costly reference evaluations? We study this capability by formulating automatic benchmark development as a meta-evaluation problem, where an agent is given a task and an expensive reference benchmark and requested to construct a lower-cost proxy benchmark that faithfully distinguishes among candidate models and solutions. Based on this formulation, we introduce EvalBuilder, a framework for evaluating such benchmark-generation capabilities along three key dimensions: fidelity, efficiency, and robustness. Specifically, we assess whether generated benchmarks preserve model rankings, generalize to held-out models and freshly collected responses, and provide well-calibrated and discriminative scores while substantially reducing evaluation cost. We further provide an iterative environment in which agents can refine their benchmarks under a fixed time budget. Our framework provides a systematic testbed and benchmark for understanding when current LLM agents can develop useful evaluators and how benchmark construction itself can be increasingly automated.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have driven rapid progress in autonomous agents, yet standard evaluations remain confined to static task solving. An emerging frontier is harness evolution---the agent's capacity to autonomously optimize its own operating harness. However, systematically benchmarking this capability remains challenging, as existing evaluations fail to isolate harness improvements from base model strength, prevent task-specific overfitting, or capture long-horizon iterative research. To address these challenges, we introduce Evo-Bench, the first benchmark designed to evaluate models' intrinsic harness-evolving capabilities across Search, Office, and General agent domains. To rigorously isolate this capability, Evo-Bench employs a novel harness-guided construction framework: it leverages auxiliary-task evolution to identify tasks genuinely sensitive to framework improvements, followed by sensitivity-aware stratified splitting to ensure robust cross-suite generalization. Extensive evaluations across nine frontier and open-weight models reveal that top models achieve massive absolute gains reaching 16.6 points, closely approaching state-of-the-art human-engineered baselines. Crucially, while autonomous evolution outpeforms artificial harness in General tasks and excels in Search tasks, it struggles in Office tasks that demand highly specific processing workflows. Furthermore, our analysis exposes critical temporal anomalies like early saturation, while demonstrating that the synthesized harnesses act as highly transferable reasoning structures, consistently boosting diverse policy models.