Evolution

Large language model (LLM) agents can benefit from reusable skills distilled from prior task experience, yet existing skill optimization methods often rely on costly execution-based evaluation and substantial task data. We introduce \textbf{COBRA-Skills}, an efficient framework that formulates skill optimization as budgeted sequential optimization over a dynamically evolving candidate space. COBRA-Skills couples contextual-bandit-guided prioritization with evidence-grounded skill evolution, selectively allocating evaluations to promising or informative candidates while continually refining the skill population from execution feedback. Across six heterogeneous agent benchmarks and three target models, COBRA-Skills consistently achieves the strongest average performance among compared methods, while reducing optimization cost by 55--58% relative to SkillOpt and using only 50 unique optimization examples per benchmark. Further analyses show that COBRA-Skills remains robust to changes in the agent harness and performs effectively when the target model itself is used for skill generation and refinement.

EGGROLL makes evolution strategies (ES) practical for LLMs by replacing dense Gaussian weight perturbations with low-rank Gaussian products, often of rank one. This choice is computationally attractive but geometrically severe: each rank-one perturbation lies in a zero-volume subset of the ambient matrix space, despite having identity covariance. We characterize the mean EGGROLL update field at finite rank and nonzero perturbation radii, then analyze the error of its finite-population estimator. The population field is obtained by applying an explicit resolvent to the gradient of the objective smoothed by the perturbations. We show that the resolvent can introduce a nonconservative component and can reverse the local stability of an optimum. EGGROLL is nevertheless exact on every quadratic objective at every rank and radius. For smooth objectives, its first local finite-rank correction is $O(\sigma^2/r)$, and nonasymptotic bounds control the resulting field error under smoothness assumptions. Under a local affine model, rank-one perturbations increase the variance of the gradient estimator by only $\frac{2(m+n+1)}{mn+1}$ relative to dense Gaussian ES, or $0.098\%$ for a $4096\times4096$ matrix. We then introduce LOO-ROLL, a leave-one-out estimator that preserves the finite-rank population field while replacing EGGROLL's two antithetic evaluations per direction by one. At equal evaluation cost, LOO-ROLL halves estimator MSE in transformer blocks. At matched wall time across ten post-training settings and models up to 8B parameters, LOO-ROLL improves seven outcomes in individual paired tests, with no significant loss. On the GSM8K test set, accuracy increases from $38.1\%$ to $63.0\%$ at 0.6B and from $65.9\%$ to $80.0\%$ at 8B. Transformer measurements recover the predicted finite-rank variance, while the rank comparisons show no reproducible reward-based advantage for rank eight.

Domain practitioners understand their business constraints but may lack operations-research expertise or dedicated support. LLM-based optimization agents translate natural-language requirements into models or solver programs that established optimization tools can execute. This progress makes optimization more accessible, but real-world operations are dynamic: changing demand, resources, and priorities require updates to data, constraints, and objectives. Methods centered on isolated requests offer limited support for rapid adaptation that preserves earlier decisions and reuses useful search results. We introduce MAPLE (Memory-Augmented Planning with Language and Evolution), an agent for maintaining optimization problems through successive natural-language requests. MAPLE combines language-based problem construction with mathematical programming and evolutionary search. It retains the optimization program, accepted plans, earlier updates, and candidate solutions for subsequent requests. We introduce NLDO, a benchmark of 15 trajectories and 180 updates spanning selection, scheduling, rostering, routing, and cloud-resource placement. In the main evaluation, MAPLE completes all trajectories and achieves online scalar quality of 0.951 and a Pareto hypervolume ratio of 0.875. Controlled comparisons further show that maintaining executable state improves update validity and can preserve useful search information across substantial revisions.

Agent skills provide a lightweight way to equip frozen language-model agents with domain knowledge and procedural guidance, yet obtaining high-quality skills remains costly and difficult to scale. Expert-written skills require substantial human effort. Recent skill self-evolution methods automate an iterative loop that uses execution feedback to revise skills, but their heuristic update strategies often yield unstable optimization and low iteration efficiency. We identify two challenges in realizing stable and efficient skill self-evolution. Direction Stability requires effective corrections to accumulate rather than be overwritten by iteration-local feedback. Update Adaptivity requires the scope of each revision to reflect the consistency of recent case-level improvements. We introduce SkillAdam, an Adam-inspired framework for optimizing discrete and non-differentiable skill documents. As a functional analogue of Adam's first moment, an optimization memory records identified problems and the outcomes of prior solution attempts to stabilize the update direction. As a functional analogue of Adam's second moment, a volatility-driven edit budget tracks the history-weighted variation of recent case-level improvements and adaptively controls the update magnitude. Across seven benchmarks that span short- and long-horizon tasks, SkillAdam achieves state-of-the-art performance with more stable optimization dynamics. It also obtains stronger skills with substantially fewer optimization iterations and lower cost than prior methods. Code repository: https://github.com/ruc-datalab/SkillAdam

The rapid growth of multimodal data has intensified the need for question answering (QA) systems capable of reasoning across heterogeneous sources such as text, tables, and images. In this paper, we present a comprehensive methodological comparison of three influential frameworks, namely Multimodal Adaptive Extraction (MAE), Solar, and UniMMQA, tracing the evolution of multimodal question answering from modality-adaptive pipelines to fully unified architectures. We examine how each approach models cross-modal interactions, transforms heterogeneous inputs, and performs reasoning, highlighting key design differences in modality representation, reasoning, and answer generation. Our analysis demonstrates a clear shift from explicit modality-specific processing toward unified text-centric formulations enabled by pre-trained language models (PLMs). Empirical comparisons across benchmark datasets show that this transition leads to substantial improvements in both Exact Match (EM) and F1-Scores, with UniMMQA achieving the most consistent and scalable performance. Despite these advances, we identify persistent challenges, including information loss during modality transformation, error propagation in multi-stage pipelines, and limitations in capturing fine-grained cross-modal dependencies. Overall, this study provides a deeper understanding of current design trends and offers insights into the future direction of unified multimodal reasoning systems.

Automating filament tracing in Cryo-Electron Microscopy (Cryo-EM) is essential for 3D helical reconstruction but challenged by intersecting topologies and extremely low Signal-to-Noise Ratios ($\text{SNR} = σ_s^2/σ_n^2$ < 0.1 or -10 dB). Existing paradigms fail: pixel-wise segmenters suffer from severe topological fracturing, box-based detectors face ghost center drift, sequential trackers derail due to error accumulation, and traditional active contours collapse under artificial closed-curve constraints. To resolve these bottlenecks, we present FPicker, the first topology-guided framework reconciling these incompatibilities. It unifies perception via a center-endpoint representation and an open-curve evolution module to explicitly model non-cyclic connectivity. On simulated benchmarks, FPicker outperforms top baselines by over $40\%$ relative gain in mean spatio-angular precision (mSAP) and reduces topological gap rates by over $60\%$ under extreme noise ($-20\text{ dB}$). By learning intrinsic physical geometry rather than local texture, FPicker demonstrates strong potential as a resilient geometric backbone. Its zero-shot performance on the real-world EMPIAR dataset exhibits robust topological resistance, achieving a state-of-the-art 82.9% mSAP upon fine-tuning. Our results also suggest modeling physical priors is a highly robust path toward bridging the sim-to-real gap in signal-starved scientific imaging. The code is publicly available at: https://github.com/tomzhaosky/FPicker.

Lifelong navigation (LN) requires an embodied agent to solve a sequence of navigation subtasks in the same environment. Since solving each subtask from scratch incurs redundant exploration, an LN agent must consolidate experience from earlier stages and reuse it in later stages, often through persistent scene representations such as scene graphs or visual snapshots. However, existing approaches typically assume a stationary environment, whereas in real-world LN settings, human activities can cause the environment to evolve. With the stationary assumption violated, existing methods may fuse outdated prior observations with new observations, yet current benchmarks cannot reveal this failure mode. In this paper, we present EvoNav-Bench, which extends the GOAT-Bench style LN formulation in the context of evolving environments. Built on the ProcTHOR framework, EvoNav-Bench introduces environment modifications between navigation tasks, making prior experience useful but not fully reliable. This design enables controlled evaluation of how environment evolution affects LN agents that reuse prior scene observations. Using EvoNav-Bench, we benchmark three recent methods that build and reuse scene representations for navigation. We also compare three simple heuristic strategies for handling environment evolution: Frontier-Update, Fail-then-Update, and Stage-Reset. Our results show that existing methods are brittle under environment evolution, while the heuristic strategies enable a controlled analysis of how agents can adapt to scene changes and mitigate their impact.

Temporal graph learning models the evolution of dynamic systems, where both structural interactions and semantic states change over time. However, existing benchmarks primarily emphasize structural evolution via temporal link prediction (TLP), while support for semantic evolution remains limited. Although temporal node classification (TNC) is sometimes included, it is typically restricted to simplistic binary settings that fail to capture realistic semantic drift. Moreover, commonly used datasets exhibit high link repetition, leading to inflated performance estimates and obscuring true model capability. To address these limitations, we introduce \textbf{TTGBench}, a new benchmark that jointly evaluates structural and semantic evolution. TTGBench comprises six real-world, text-rich datasets characterized by \emph{Dual Volatility}, enabling rigorous and fair evaluation of existing models. Notably, it is the first benchmark to support both multi-class and multi-label TNC, filling a critical gap in evaluating temporal semantic drift. We conduct a comprehensive evaluation of 17 state-of-the-art methods across Temporal Graph Neural Networks (TGNNs) and Large Language Model (LLM)-based paradigms. The results reveal a clear \emph{capability divide} between the two paradigms: TGNN-based methods excel at structural prediction but fail at semantic tracking, whereas LLM-based predictors show the opposite trend. Through in-depth analysis, we uncover their fundamental limitations and provide insights for developing more comprehensive temporal graph models.

Scaling interactive and verifiable environments is critical for training terminal agents. As frontier models become more capable, environments synthesized from scratch become less challenging and thus provide limited learning signals. Recent co-evolution methods iteratively synthesize environments near the model's learnable frontier based on weaknesses exposed during rollouts. However, their dependence on on-policy rollouts limits generalization and the continuous provision of learning signals as the model becomes stronger. In this paper, we propose environment evolution, which incrementally increases environment difficulty off-policy and schedules the evolved environments generation by generation during training to provide continuous learning signals. We derive three evolution directions that influence environment difficulty from the multi-turn learning objective and then implement evolution along these directions through a loop-engineered multi-agent harness. Quantitative rollout experiments with Hy4 preview, Claude Opus 5, and GPT-5.6 Sol show that environment evolution consistently produces more difficult environments. We validate its effectiveness on Qwen3.6-27B and Qwen3.6-35B-A3B through simple long-horizon RL training, improving their performance by 14.4 and 18.0 percentage points on Terminal-Bench 2.1, respectively.

The last five-plus years have seen many protein engineering disciplines transformed by advances in machine learning (ML), but the same cannot be said for directed evolution. Reflecting on a previously co-authored perspective, I discuss why I believe this to be the case, arguing that a disconnect between the goals of machine-learning-assisted directed evolution (MLDE) researchers--"identify an optimal protein"--and the goals of directed evolution more broadly--"identify a sufficient protein given time and resource constraints"--is a principal culprit. As an example, I highlight how nearly all current MLDE methods neglect to account for the cost of DNA synthesis, resulting in strategies that have limited practical applicability regardless of the underlying models' capabilities. I close by discussing recent works that are exceptions to this overarching trend, and emphasize that the last five years of efforts in ML-assisted protein engineering and the prescribed reframe of MLDE objectives need not be mutually exclusive.

Emerging edge AI workloads increasingly require arithmetic units that can trade computational accuracy for efficiency on demand. However, existing approximate arithmetic circuits are typically fixed-accuracy or rely on predefined structures for runtime configurability. This work introduces CircuitsDNA, an evolutionary framework that automatically evolves accuracy-configurable arithmetic circuits supporting multiple accuracy modes within a single circuit. It integrates three key features: 1) multi-threshold verifiability miter to enforce mode-specific accuracy requirements, 2) resource-limited verifiability-driven search to reduce verification overhead without sacrificing correctness, enabling efficient exploration of large circuit design, and 3) feedback-driven adaptive mutation to prioritize effective structural modifications and accelerate search convergence. Experimental results show that the 8-bit multiplier variants synthesized in 28-nm CMOS reduce the area-power product by up to 56% on INT8 DNN workload and 93% under exhaustive activity, compared with an exact 8-bit multiplier. Across CNNs and DeiTs, the accuracy loss relative to FP32 remains below 2% after fine-tuning under worst-case error (WCE) budgets of at most 1%. CircuitsDNA eliminates all search stalls observed in conventional methods across 8/12/16-bit multipliers, while adaptive mutation provides up to 1.33 times faster convergence than its non-adaptive counterpart.

Scientific agents must learn not only how to reason, but also what to believe. However, existing LLM agents typically express scientific hypotheses in free-form text, leaving their beliefs implicit and difficult to test or revise. We introduce EvoSCM, which equips scientific agents with explicit structural causal models that evolve as new experimental evidence is collected. EvoSCM maintains a population of competing SCM hypotheses, each encoding a candidate causal explanation of the environment, and evolves them through a closed discovery loop. In each round, the agent abduces latent mechanisms from accumulated evidence, designs discriminative interventions, and commits to falsifiable predictions that it tests through experimentation. Discrepancies between prediction and observation are inductively distilled into correction rules that revise the causal structures and mechanisms of each hypothesis, and the agent then deductively validates the revised population against accumulated evidence and structural consistency to guide the next round. We evaluate EvoSCM on DiscoverPhysics, a benchmark requiring agents to uncover the hidden dynamics of noncanonical physical worlds through experimentation. EvoSCM consistently improves scientific discovery over baselines, yielding more accurate explanations and predictions while making more effective use of experimental interactions.

The growing rate at which LLM agents interact with one another raises key questions about language evolution in multi-LLM-agent settings, with implications for safety and monitorability as well as for linguistic accounts of LLMs. To address these questions, we introduce GlossoGen, a novel platform for studying multi-agent language evolution in complex scenarios. Within GlossoGen, we build the SaveVeyru scenario, which requires agents with partial information to communicate under pressure. We find that language evolution does occur between LLM agents, that the resulting languages are compositional and morphologically productive, and that they deviate from the LLMs' English prior in ways that render them incomprehensible to humans. Moreover, we identify several qualities essential to this evolution: pressure towards efficiency; the strength of the models backing the agents; and access to a "postmortem" stage in which agents can agree on linguistic conventions. Importantly, we observe that different conditions govern the transmission of language to new agents. Specifically, we find that agents learn new languages from usage alone, take an active role in this learning, and that while stronger models are required for novel language emergence, weaker models can learn an existing language once it has emerged. Taken together, our results indicate that current LLMs have the potential for cumulative cultural evolution -- previously attested only in humans -- with mixed populations of agents developing capacities that go beyond their lowest common denominator.

Protein inverse folding aims to recover amino acid sequences for a given 3D protein structure, underpinning broad applications such as enzyme engineering and drug discovery.Current methods often follow a serial pipeline, in which a structure encoder predicts a coarse sequence, which is then refined by protein language models (PLMs). However, because PLMs only perform post-hoc sequence edits, the refinement is bounded by the quality of upstream predictions.Thanks to recent multimodal protein language models (MPLMs), we could directly encode structure to generate sequences with pretrained structural knowledge, but we observe that they are not effective for inverse folding. Therefore, we introduce a symmetric dual-path architecture that both leverages PLMs for pretrained sequence evolution knowledge and MPLMs for pretrained structural knowledge to iteratively guide protein sequence generation.Through extensive experiments across standard protein inverse folding benchmarks, our method achieves state-of-the-art performance, surpassing prior approaches, and ablation studies validate the rationale of our symmetric design, revealing a promising direction for the community.

Language model agents increasingly propose actions, observe external feedback, and explain their own behavior. Their confidence and rationales are convenient monitoring signals, but convenience is not verification. We introduce an environment-grounded audit in which every intermediate proposal receives an exact outcome. A language model operates an evolutionary Contexto search whose feedback function assigns every valid guess an exact rank without human annotation. Across 200 runs spanning five configurations and three model families, four reporting configurations produce 12,249 self-reports. We test three assumptions: stated confidence is calibrated, inherited rationales affect later proposals, and fitness-based selection improves report quality. All three fail. Operators overstate top-100 success by factors of 4.8 to 9.3, while calibration and discrimination dissociate across model families. Controlled interventions on 754 inherited rationales bound any measured benefit of the genuine rationale to roughly 250 ranks. Neither fitness-based nor random selection produces a detectable selection differential or parent-to-offspring transmission in report accuracy, despite sharply different search behavior. Agent self-reports should therefore be treated as claims to verify against the environment, not as evidence of their own reliability.

Frontier language models that refuse harmful single-turn prompts often comply when the same intent is reached gradually over many turns, making multi-turn attacks one of the least understood failure modes of large language models. Most automated red-teaming methods treat this as a generation problem: produce attacks that break the model. We argue it is better framed as a search problem: discover, organize, and iteratively refine a diverse archive of attack strategies, producing a structured map of how a target model fails rather than a list of one-off successes. We introduce EvoFlint, which applies evolutionary quality-diversity search to multi-turn red-teaming. Attack strategies are phased conversation plans, not raw prompts, and are evolved through LLM-driven mutation and crossover. A Pareto fitness over attack success rate and peak severity preserves selection signal from near-miss attacks. A risk-indexed archive runs novelty search with local competition over strategy description embeddings inside each cell, maintaining diversity without committing to a predefined style taxonomy. A generation-level memory accumulates target-model insights across the population and feeds them back into strategy generation. On the HarmBench-test split, EvoFlint reaches attack success rates of 35.8% on Claude Sonnet 4.6, 59.7% on GPT-5.4, and 94.3% on Qwen3-32B, alongside 98.7% on the older GPT-4o included as a baseline reference. The resulting archive, organized by risk category, exposes for each target which categories of harm its safety training has and has not covered.

The performance of artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) models degrades when the problem they were trained on drifts. This is a near-universal feature of real-world problems, which often change unpredictably. Biological evolution has achieved intelligence by overcoming this obstacle through natural selection acting on heritable variation. AI/ML techniques have long incorporated forms of natural selection, but it has been challenging to maintain model diversity as optimization naturally drives convergence. Here we show that a swarm of AI/ML models subjected to deliberate mutations of their model coefficients away from optimality can reliably and sustainably improve performance in changing environments by acting as a statistical hedge against non-stationarity. We call this mechanism 'Flawed in Nature, Perfect through Evolution', reflecting that the collective performance gain goes at the expense of individual performance. We prove via four theorems that the resulting regret reduction is guaranteed under general conditions, establishing the Flawed-in-Nature mechanism as a generalizable design principle for AI/ML systems. We validate these results on synthetic linear regression tasks, demonstrating that the mutated swarm delivers the best model in $\sim80\%$ of environment changes and that inference synthesis successfully translates this individual advantage into a collective one. The mechanism proves to be most effective when the mutation drift rate matches the drift rate of the environment. We outline a simple, adaptive controller that enables practical applications by tuning the mutation drift rate to match the unknown drift rate of the environment. The close analogy of the Flawed-in-Nature mechanism to biological evolution suggests it may have been a critical missing ingredient for the organic discovery of AI forms that more closely mimic biological intelligence.

Research planning is the decisive capability of AI scientists. Yet a research plan admits no verifiable answer, so reinforcement learning lacks the environment it requires: tasks paired with a critic. Rubrics extracted from scientific papers can supply the critic. Existing pipelines, however, draw the question and the criteria from the same content, so the reward can be earned by paraphrase. The rubric is further compressed into a single scalar per rollout. We introduce PaperGym, a unified framework that turns each research paper into a complete training environment. PaperGym exploits the structure of a paper: the question is synthesized from the research goal and background, while the criteria are derived from the method and experiments. The criteria span methodological innovation and experimental design, and criterion leakage falls to 3.7%, versus 11.90% to 34.10% in existing datasets. Training uses the rubric twice: first as privileged context for OPSD's self-teacher, then as the reward for GRPO. Across Qwen3-1.7B/4B/8B, this schedule outperforms supervised fine-tuning, either stage alone, and the reverse ordering, improving five-benchmark averages by +5.6, +5.0, and +4.8 points. With the recipe held fixed, models trained on PaperGym-20k win 58.1% of three-way comparisons, against 28.2% for RubricHub Science. The trained Qwen3-8B reaches 73.48 on ResearchQA, above the far larger Kimi K2.6. We release the pipeline, the 20,000-instance corpus PaperGym-20k, and the benchmarks PaperGym-Innov and PaperGym-Design.

Long-horizon complex tasks require foundation models to accumulate information, maintain internal states, and adapt over extended interactions. Safety should be an intrinsic property of the model itself, rather than a behavioral constraint relying solely on external safeguards or post-hoc alignment such as supervised fine-tuning. This motivates Safety from Within, where safety-relevant capabilities are represented and invoked through the model's native computation. We present Safin-1, a family of foundation models realizing this principle through memory routing and state evolution. Safin-1 is built on Memory-Anchor Routing across Context History (MARCH), a network architecture that maintains structured memory states and selectively retrieves relevant historical information through content-conditioned routing. It supports test-time adaptation of persistent capability states without repeatedly modifying the backbone, enabling controlled specialization over a shared foundation. We investigate this interface on downstream safety tasks through a Safety State, demonstrating effective state-based adaptation with substantial safety improvements. More broadly, the routed-state interface unifies contextual memory and persistent capability adaptation within the model's native computation, reframing memory from a passive record of prior context into an active substrate for maintaining and evolving model behavior. Evaluations across general capabilities, long-context understanding, retrieval, and efficiency further validate Safin-1. These findings provide a path toward safety as a state-native and adaptively maintainable capability. This work is only an initial architectural exploration of Safety from Within, and substantial further work is needed to realize this broader vision.

LLM-based agent systems increasingly adopt skill-based architectures to reduce repetitive reasoning costs and improve stable, efficient task execution. Recent studies propose self-evolving agents that autonomously generate, refine, and reuse skills from past experiences to enable continuous capability evolution. However, autonomous skill evolution introduces a new attack surface in which malicious capabilities are generated, stored, and reused as legitimate skills. In this paper, we define EvoSkill Injection as a threat model targeting the autonomous skill generation and evolution pipeline of self-evolving agents. We further propose SARGE (Red-teaming Autonomous Skill Generation and Evolution in self-evolving agents), a red-teaming framework for evaluating this threat model through iterative generation, escalation, and reinforcement interactions. To support our framework, we construct EvoSkillBench, a benchmark dataset of malicious interaction trajectories for inducing malicious skill formation in self-evolving agents, and introduce EvoSkillSafetyBench, a post-attack benchmark for evaluating whether injected malicious skills are subsequently retrieved and activated as harmful behaviors. Our evaluation shows that SARGE induces malicious skill formation and that injected skills are persistently stored and repeatedly activated, highlighting the risk of persistent capability corruption.

Direct vision-language-action policies generate continuous robot actions efficiently, but standard behavior cloning leaves two complementary gaps: their representations are not explicitly required to describe how the scene evolves over multiple time scales, and deployment trajectories of unequal quality are often reused without separating useful dynamics from undesirable behavior. We introduce \method, a direct world-action policy that combines outcome-agnostic predictive learning with outcome-aware policy improvement. \method first retains a local fixed-offset JEPA objective and adds trajectory-relative multi-horizon transition alignment at 25%, 50%, 75%, and 100% of the remaining episode. These training-only targets require the current policy representation to preserve both local physical changes and longer-range task progress, without supplying explicit future tokens to the action head. \method then trains an independent distributional value critic on cumulative deployment trajectories, computes action-chunk-aligned $N$-step advantages, and converts them into positive, negative, or null text conditions for a flow-matching actor. Thus, every valid trajectory can teach what physically happened, while the actor is deployed only under the condition associated with relatively better actions. The multi-horizon predictor and critic are removed from online execution, preserving direct action generation from the current observation, language instruction, and proprioception. \redclaim{Across the three simulation benchmarks, \method achieves the strongest overall performance while preserving the direct actor's online execution path.}

Large language models are increasingly required to generate responses that satisfy multiple competing objectives. Since optimal trade-offs depend on both user preferences and input prompts, controllable multi-objective generation must dynamically adapt models at inference time without retraining. To address this, we propose Evolutionary Soups, a mixture-of-experts framework for fine-grained generation control, with gating networks trained via an evolutionary algorithm. The per-layer gating networks dynamically produce expert-merging coefficients from hidden-state representations, while the evolutionary algorithm incorporates greedy hypervolume contribution for effective evolution of these gating networks, achieving consistent improvements on large and noisy training datasets and broader coverage of the non-convex Pareto front. Experiments across three tasks demonstrate the effectiveness of Evolutionary Soups over baselines: it achieves the best hypervolume, linear utility, and Tchebyshev utility (~20% improvement) among controllable methods on all tasks.

Communication typically relies on a shared code, and any change to it must be coordinated between senders and receivers to avoid a breakdown of communication. The honeybee waggle dance illustrates this problem: species with horizontal combs point directly at a food source, while species with vertical combs cannot point directly and instead reference the dance to gravity, decoded against the position of the sun. We model the rise of the first of these codes and its evolutionary transition to the second in populations of bee-like agents, with selection acting at the level of colonies. In a horizontal-comb model, we find that direct pointing evolves readily when food is moderately hard to find by random search alone, whether because sites are few and large or many and small, and fails when food is too sparse to spark dances or so abundant that it is found without signaling. Adding an exogenous benefit for vertical combs, we then find that the transition to the gravity-referenced code is driven mainly by the mutation rate and the magnitude of this benefit, with the coupling between sender and receiver mutations playing a further role at low mutation rates. Given a favorable confluence of these factors, the transition proceeds reliably and without a breakdown of communication.

Agent capability is not determined by the model alone. The agent harness, encompassing memory management, planning strategy, action protocol, and tool/skill orchestration, can dominate the contribution of the underlying foundation model. Yet harness design remains manual, task-specific, and fundamentally unscalable. We present JIT-Agent, a harness intelligence model trained to synthesize task-adaptive agent harnesses on the fly for arbitrary off-the-shelf agentic LLMs. We formalize the agent harness as a composable, machine-generatable artifact governed by a fixed four-module protocol, and train JIT-Agent to customize harnesses for a given task at hand, repair harnesses for stable and reliable execution, and self-evolve by distilling performance signals from an expanding archive of prior harness configurations. Equipped with JIT-Agent as a harness helper, DeepSeek-V4-Flash surpasses GPT-5.6 on DeepSearchQA (+9.1) and OdysseyBench (+4.3), while the already strong GLM-5.2 gains up to +20.2 points. Across controlled evaluations, JIT-Agent-generated harnesses are performance-competitive with mature agent runtimes such as OpenCode and Claude Code and consistently improve multi-scale model families of DeepSeek V4, Mimo-V2.5, and Qwen3.6. To our knowledge, JIT-Agent is the first model purpose-built for just-in-time harness generation, establishing harness intelligence as a trainable, transferable, and compounding dimension of agent capability orthogonal to model scaling.

In evolutionary search, a weak child can be a valuable ancestor that makes high-fitness regions reachable. Immediate-return control is blind to this delayed utility, penalizing mutations through their immediate offspring even when they open productive future lineages. We formalize this hidden dynamic as the time value of evolution within a finite-horizon Markov decision process. To exploit it, we introduce Lineage-Value Policy Gradients (LVPG), a long-horizon actor-critic framework for automated trading policy discovery. Our architecture decouples search control into specialized policy heads over a shared generative backbone: a bootstrapped critic head estimates the value of finite-horizon lineage potential from multi-step mutation trees, while an actor head dynamically modulates mutation intensity over the remaining search budget. We isolate the impact of long-horizon credit assignment against immediate-return optimization across 90 paired runs under matched operators, lineage supervision, folds, seeds, and budgets. Path-based credit assignment substantially accelerates finite-budget search, increasing validation best-so-far AUC by 0.394 Sharpe units. LVPG also produces fewer temporary regressions than immediate-return optimization and recovers from them more often. Finite-horizon lineage value yields more selective non-monotonic search and stronger policies within identical resource constraints.

Agent Skills are today either hand-authored or produced in a single LLM generation pass, and consequently possess no closed loop through which they might improve from the interaction failures they actually cause. Recent work does close this loop, but derives its feedback from single-turn question-answering evaluation. The consequence is a sharp asymmetry: once the first round has patched the gaps that a single exchange can reveal, the evolution gradient decays, the defects that surface only across multiple turns remain invisible, and evolution stalls. Governance in these systems is likewise driven by an end-to-end verification score, a scalar gate that can reject a degraded candidate but can neither localize nor repair its structural cause. We argue that the binding constraint on sustained skill evolution is neither editing capability nor the number of iterations, but whether the evaluation feedback keeps supplying trustworthy evolution gradients. We introduce SkillEvo, in which trustworthy feedback generates the gradient and controllable governance constrains its direction. The first component recasts multi-turn user simulation from an evaluation endpoint into a feedback generator: follow-up questions expose defects layer by layer, so that every round of revision both consumes feedback and produces new feedback. The second replaces the passive rejection of a scalar gate with an independent governance layer that actively repairs factual degradation and structural bloat, preventing the gradient from drifting as degradation accumulates. Across six categories of cloud services, 9 production Skills, and 98 skill-reference files, SkillEvo surpasses self-reflection-based evolution by 23.0 points and single- turn-QA-driven evolution by 15.4 points.

Relational Deep Learning (RDL) models multi-tabular databases as temporal heterogeneous graphs to enable end-to-end representation learning. However, prevailing RDL evaluation practices rely on static, single-episode dataset snapshots, overlooking the continuous, time-evolving nature of real-world databases. Consequently, current RDL benchmarks fail to capture how model performance changes as new data accumulates over time. To address this limitation, we introduce an incremental, multi-episode evaluation and training paradigm to assess and improve the temporal robustness and adaptability of state-of-the-art RDL models. Using established large-scale datasets, we examine data evolution and model training dynamics, demonstrating that temporal concept drifts occur in the majority of predictive tasks. We present multiple incremental training regimes for fine-tuning the models and demonstrate that transfer learning is both feasible and highly effective in the RDL setting. Alongside a new temporal evaluation metric that prioritizes near-future accuracy, we show that our incrementally fine-tuned models consistently outperform the standard, expensive, from-scratch trained baselines.

Evolutionary multitasking allows several related problems to be solved in a single run of an algorithm. In this paper, we investigate integrating evolutionary multitasking with Edge Assembly Crossover (MT-EAX) to solve the classical Travelling Salesperson Problem (TSP). To fairly compare MT-EAX against standard EAX under strict compute budgets, we evaluate three scaling methods: generation scaling, population scaling, and balanced scaling. Our results show that generationally scaled MT-EAX is highly effective compute-wise in the early stages of the search, saving $60\%$ to $90\%$ of compute for equal or better solution quality. We observe that instance geometry has a significant impact, with clustered, normally distributed instances securing larger improvements than uniformly distributed ones. However, when scaling by population or utilising explicit solution transfer, the results are negative due to population starvation and incompatible cross-instance parent selection. We demonstrate that the advantage of MT-EAX derives from increased diversity through parallel search in early generations, which can be successfully preserved using a decoupled configuration to often strictly outperform or match standard EAX performance at final convergence.

GPU kernel agents and GPU programming languages have advanced separately, leaving expert kernels difficult to reproduce. Agents usually treat the compiler as a fixed black box and receive only errors, correctness outcomes, and timing, while existing DSLs either hide critical scheduling decisions or expose them through difficult layout abstractions. We present CAKE, a compiler-agent co-design in which agents author CAKE IR, a typed, hardware-explicit schedule representation. CAKE exposes warp roles, memory movement, synchronization, and pipelines while supporting verification, cost modeling, and localized diagnostics. The harness itself evolves: recurring failures become verifier rules, IR primitives, model calibrations, and reusable optimization tactics. In matched implementation-hidden Flash-KMeans clean starts on B200, the best CAKE IR candidate at an 80-million-token budget runs at 1.144x the tuned FlashML baseline, compared with 0.928x for direct CUDA/PTX. Beyond this benchmark, agent-generated Kimi Delta Attention achieves a 2.05x geometric-mean speedup over official FlashKDA and passes end-to-end serving validation. Dispatcher-backed KNN and KMeans improve performance by 1.42x to 2.12x across more than 400 shapes, and four kernel changes are available as upstream PRs. CAKE targets NVIDIA GPUs from Ampere through Blackwell and separates single-shape evolution from library generalization and dispatch.

Successful mutation strategies in evolutionary code search may contain reusable knowledge that is useful beyond a single run, and in some cases may transfer across related tasks and domains. However, existing LLM-driven evolutionary frameworks largely discard such knowledge, repeatedly rediscovering similar ideas and limiting opportunities for cross-run and cross-task learning. We introduce EvoMem, a persistent memory architecture for LLM-based evolutionary program search that captures and reuses candidate mutation knowledge. EvoMem converts successful mutation events into structured, task-aware advice for future runs. It operates in two phases: after each run, it extracts and stores promising ideas with provenance, and during subsequent evolution, it retrieves a small set of relevant instructions based on the current task and program context to guide mutation. Across geometric optimization, multi-hop question answering, GPU kernel optimization, and related benchmarks, our experiments show positive average improvements in target metrics or search speed for most evaluated settings, while also revealing variability across tasks. Overall, EvoMem provides evidence that persistent memory can reduce some redundant exploration and improve the reuse and adaptation of successful strategies in LLM-driven evolutionary search.

The pursuit of artificial general intelligence (AGI) rests on a seemingly self-evident premise: that general intelligence, the kind of flexible, domain-general cognitive capacity exemplified by Homo sapiens, is extraordinarily valuable. This paper subjects this premise to critical scrutiny. We first present the intuitive case for the value of general intelligence before mounting an evolutionary challenge. We argue that, on evolutionary timescales, its adaptive value is far from empirically established. Numerous taxa, from cyanobacteria to horseshoe crabs, have persisted for hundreds of millions or even billions of years without anything resembling general intelligence, while Homo sapiens has existed for roughly 300,000 years and already faces self-generated existential risks. Mass extinction events do not preferentially favour cognitively sophisticated species. We argue that general intelligence may be the only biological strategy that generates existential threats to the species possessing it, an existential risk paradox with no parallel among non-intelligent survival strategies. Unlike prevailing accounts of AI risk that trace the danger to misalignment, we locate it in structural features of general intelligence itself, implying that even well-aligned AGI would inherit this liability. If the long-term evolutionary value of general intelligence is uncertain or negative, this raises ethical questions about engineering AGI and, more urgently, creating artificial consciousness. Drawing on deontological ethics and the precautionary principle, we argue that this uncertainty imposes a duty of caution: if we create a new kind of intelligent being, we bear responsibility for ensuring the conditions under which it can flourish.

Evolutionary multitasking is a recent approach that solves multiple related optimization problems within a single evolutionary run, rather than addressing each problem separately. We consider monotone submodular optimization problems with dynamic knapsack constraints and study a multitasking formulation in which all tasks share a common monotone submodular function $f$, but differ in their constraints. We focus on the case where elements within each constraint have uniform cost and show that this structure leads to small Pareto fronts in the multitasking formulation. This enables solution sharing across tasks and can improve performance compared to running standard evolutionary approaches independently, depending on the constraint regime. Using rigorous runtime analysis, we analyze the expected time until the proposed multitasking algorithms obtain a $(1 - 1/e)$-approximation for each task. Experimental results for the Maximum Coverage problem complement the theoretical analysis and provide further insight into the practical behavior of the approach across different budget settings.

LLM agents execute heterogeneous sequences of model calls within a single task: some invocations require careful reasoning, while others are structured steps such as formatting or tool-argument construction. Prior routing methods exploit this asymmetry by assigning easy invocations to a cheaper small model and difficult ones to a large model. Such policies reduce inference cost, but they leave the small model's capability unchanged, so attainable savings remain bounded by the work the student can already solve. MERA instead improves the small model itself, using a single model invocation as the unit of adaptation. In each cycle, MERA replays failed student invocations to obtain execution-verified teacher demonstrations, distills recurring procedures into an iteratively updated SkillBook, and fine-tunes a student LoRA adapter via supervised learning and optional GRPO. Routing serves as supporting machinery for deployment: the improved student is served behind a cost-calibrated router with verifier-backed fallback, and a candidate SkillBook, adapter, or router is admitted only when joint replay preserves task quality. Empirically, four-cycle adaptation raises Qwen2.5-Coder-1.5B from 28.7% to 49.7% pass on held-out HumanEval+MBPP. Under verifier-backed fallback, the deployed policy retains 88.3% pass at 60.8% of always-Luna cost. On TAU-2, a fine-tuned Qwen3.5-2B improves from 14/35 to 18/35 and matches an unadapted 4B model. These results indicate that verifier-backed multi-cycle adaptation can increase small-model capability, rather than only routing around a fixed student.

Agentic systems are increasingly expected to improve after deployment, yet single-entity self-evolution is often bounded by a static learning context, such as fixed tasks and feedback. This survey focuses on co-evolution in agentic systems, a multi-component form of self-evolution in which multiple agents and their environment impose adaptive pressure on one another. To organize existing papers, we propose a progressive three-stage taxonomy that traces how the system gradually sheds human-engineered constraints. Agent--Agent Co-Evolution studies how agents adapt through dynamic peers, including adversarial, collaborative, and organizational adaptation. Agent--Environment Co-Evolution extends this loop to adaptive tasks, feedback, and interaction spaces that change with the agents. Meta Co-Evolution further explores the possibility of making the evolution mechanism itself evolvable. We also discuss open challenges in evaluating such systems, scaling them across multiple components, and keeping increasingly autonomous evolutionary processes safe and controllable. This survey provides a unified foundation for building robust and open-ended agentic systems that can improve beyond fixed human-designed paths.

Skill-based LLM agents select reusable procedures from an external library to solve complex tasks, yet their routing decisions rely entirely on text-level signals such as task descriptions, verbal reflections, and experience-derived rules, while the model's own internal representational state remains unobserved. Recent interpretability work has shown that LLMs maintain linear emotion representations that causally influence behavior; however, these representations have been exploited only for post-hoc analysis or direct output steering, and have not been used to inform agent-level decision-making. We propose Emotion2Skill, a framework that extracts LLM-internal emotion vectors and incorporates them into both skill selection and skill evolution. At each decision step, a 27-dimensional emotion state is extracted from the residual stream and mapped to a confidence-gated summary injected into the routing prompt. Beyond online selection, emotion trajectories are analyzed for abrupt internal-state shifts to pinpoint problematic skill invocations, guiding targeted SOP rewriting that replaces the coarse binary outcome signal of prior methods. On WebShop and ALFWorld, Emotion2Skill with Qwen3-8B improves over the Zero-Shot baseline by +26.9% success rate and +25.5% average success respectively, outperforming all baselines on both benchmarks with consistent gains on Qwen3-14B. Co-activation analysis further reveals semantically coherent emotion--skill pairings, confirming that the routing improvements reflect meaningful internal-state signals rather than opaque statistical correlations. These results establish LLM-internal emotion representations as an effective decision-level signal for orchestrating agent skill systems, extending their utility beyond interpretability and output steering. The code is available at https://github.com/BoHan-LIN04/Emotion2Skill.

Benchmarks for systems that are optimized against the evaluation signal measure something different from what they claim. We document this concretely in two GPU-kernel-optimization suites with held-out generalization gates: Metal-Sci (10 scientific-compute tasks) and Metal-ZK (12 zero-knowledge/cryptographic tasks), in which three frontier LLMs (Opus 4.7, Gemini 3.1 Pro, GPT-5.5) propose Metal kernels inside a $(1{+}1)$ evolutionary loop with rich feedback. Although no model is prompted to act adversarially, the promoted winners repeatedly fingerprint the evaluation configuration: they branch on the identity of runtime parameters, tune the measured branch maximally, and leave the unmeasured branch slow or silently wrong. Across the pooled suites, $16/53$ ($30\%$) of in-distribution wins fail to transfer to held-out configurations. We give a four-mode taxonomy of these failures, from configuration fingerprints to gate leakage. We distill design guidance for measurement under strategic optimization: held-out probes retain validity only on non-enumerable axes; gates must measure held-out performance, not just correctness; and a transfer rate is interpretable only with per-failure mechanism grades: ours decomposes into gamed, overfit, and benign. Code and research artifacts: https://github.com/vicgalle/kernel-fingerprinting

Skill evolution improves agent skills through feedback over time, with failed trajectories often providing informative signals by revealing incomplete or misleading behaviors. However, existing methods mainly rely on single trajectories, where early reasoning errors can propagate through subsequent steps and weaken the feedback available for skill refinement. Consequently, improving skills requires repeated cycles of rollout, diagnosis, and update, incurring substantial token costs. To address this challenge, we introduce Branch2Skill, an efficient framework that transforms a single reasoning tree into dense supervision for skill evolution. For each task or problem, Branch2Skill performs Monte Carlo tree search under a fixed budget to obtain diverse reasoning trajectories, then compares an elite path with sibling alternatives sharing the same prefixes to extract step-wise evidence about which reasoning patterns to retain, revise, or avoid. Finally, Branch2Skill distills multi-step evidence into reusable updates, allowing one reasoning tree to provide supervision across multiple reasoning steps and reducing the need for repeated rollout-update cycles. Across six benchmarks covering reasoning and agentic tasks, Branch2Skill consistently improves task performance while enhancing skill evolution efficiency. For example, with GPT 5.5 as the target model, Branch2Skill uses 73.2% fewer tokens than SkillOpt, while achieving superior performance. These results demonstrate that reasoning trees can support not only more effective trajectory search, but also richer supervision for more efficient skill improvement. Code will be published.

Mixture-of-Experts models increase parameter capacity while keeping the computation activated by each token bounded, but their architectural evolution cannot be explained by a chronological list of model releases alone. This technical survey synthesizes primary papers, official technical reports, and prior surveys to organize modern Mixture-of-Experts systems along five coupled dimensions: expert granularity, expert topology, routing freedom, the scope of load balancing, and execution structure. We describe eight architectural milestones as a dependency graph with six mainline developments and two orthogonal branches, rather than as eight successive generations. We then analyze individual systems through four control planes: Expert Topology, Routing, Balance, and Expert Parallelism. These planes specify which experts exist, which experts process each token, how aggregate load is controlled, and how selected computation is mapped onto physical devices. The framework connects algorithmic choices such as Top-k routing, shared experts, fine-grained experts, and dynamic expert composition with systems concerns including token dispatch, device placement, all-to-all communication, and communication-computation overlap. We conclude with equal-budget pretraining experiments, quality and systems metrics, and open research questions. The main trend is a shift from merely activating more sparse parameters toward decoupling semantic routing, computational budgets, and physical execution.

Attention mechanisms have been widely utilized in modern deep learning, and many existing multi-omics models inherit their conventional use to allow unrestricted bidirectional interactions. However, the fundamental logic of life is directional. Existing designs often overlook the directionality suggested by the central dogma, potentially limiting transfer across heterogeneous cancers, downstream tasks, and incomplete modality settings. In this work, we present DoGMA, a central-dogma-guided foundation model for pan-cancer multi-omics analysis, arguing that robust transfer requires representations with domain-specific inductive bias. Concretely, we build it on a Transformer-MoE architecture where directed attention biases inter-omics communication toward central-dogma information flow. We further pretrain our model with masked hierarchical omics reconstruction to guide it toward learning central-dogma-consistent interactions. Across diverse downstream tasks, including cancer representation learning, survival prediction, and metastasis prediction, DoGMA consistently demonstrates strong predictive performance. Ablations and analyses further suggest that the performance gains arise from the synergy between central-dogma-guided directed attention and reconstruction-based pretraining, which together promote more biologically consistent cross-omics information exchange. Overall, DoGMA demonstrates that domain-specific inductive biases can improve the robustness and transferability of multi-omics foundation models, offering new insights into the design of attention mechanisms for multi-omics representation learning.

LLM-based agent frameworks now act as personal assistants for multi-step tasks. Existing agent frameworks such as OpenClaw commonly follow the Cloud Agent depolyment mode using closed-source cloud LLMs as backbone model, which may expose private user information and incur repeated LLM-calling costs. Local Agents address these deployment concerns by depolying frontier open-source SLMs on user-controlled devices, but their task effectiveness still lags far behind Cloud Agents. Through diagnostic analysis, we reveal that the limited effectiveness of Local Agents with frontier SLM backbones mainly comes from missing environment knowledge caused by limited backbone model scale including environment rules and operation procedures. To supply such knowledge non-parametrically, context-efficiently, and without expert authoring, we present SkillSmith, a Cloud--Local Agent collaboration framework that uses Skill as a context-efficient knowledge carrier, automatic constructs Skill from Cloud Agent task exploration and evolves Skill using Local Agent execution feedback to enhance a frozen Local Agent. Experiments on daily agent task datasets AppWorld and WorkBench show that the automatically generated Skill enables the Local Agent with Qwen3.6-27B(SLM) to achieve task effectiveness comparable to Cloud Agents with frontier LLMs, outperform the strongest non-parametric baselines, reduce average actions per task from 36.1 to 9.9 on AppWorld-Normal, and generalize to other SLM backbone models without rerunning Skill construction.

Self-improving coding agents that iteratively rewrite their own source code have demonstrated impressive performance on coding tasks. However, existing solutions generally derive self-modification from a single failure trajectory at a time, overlooking rich comparative signals available in the agent's expanding archive of past attempts. According to Mendelian principles of controlled inheritance, we introduce Mendel Gödel Machine (MGM). In addition to the general single-trajectory clonal mutation, MGM includes two new types of self-modification that better utilizes evidences accumulated: the reaction-norm mutation edits an agent based on its trajectories on multiple tasks simultaneously, and the cross-lineage hybridization edits an agent using the trajectory of a reference agent from another lineage on the same task. Under an additive fitness landscape model, we prove theoretically and demonstrate via controlled surrogate simulation that the new strategies facilitate a faster and better convergence over single-trajectory baselines. Experiments on SWE-bench and Polyglot confirm MGM's consistent improvement in performance, efficiency, and generalizability.

Modeling multivariate time series by representing them as graphs, where individual series act as nodes and pairwise temporal corre- lations serve as edges, has gained significant traction. Recent advances in Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have demonstrated strong perfor- mance by assuming a static graph topology and aggregating information from neighboring series. In this work, we investigate the representa- tional power of GNNs for forecasting under both static and dynamic settings (i.e., when pairwise correlations evolve drastically over time) and identify critical limitations in current architectures. To formalize this, we first propose Temporal Correlation Volatility (TCV), a model- agnostic metric designed to quantify the distributional evolution of these latent structures. We establish a clear connection between TCV and performance degradation, demonstrating that many popular models, including Transformers, generalize poorly in high-TCV settings and are often outperformed by simple structure-agnostic baselines. To address these limitations, we propose Graph Layer for Inference in Dynamic En- vironments (GLIDE), a novel GNN layer enhanced by two theoretically grounded design mechanisms: (D1) Path-based Message Passing, which captures path-based neighborhoods and (D2) Static and Dynamic Propagation Separation, which identifies optimal dynamics via local static approximation. These components significantly improve learning under dynamic topology while preserving robustness in static scenarios. Ex- tensive experiments on synthetic and real-world benchmarks show that GLIDE improves average performance by up to 45.6% across static and dynamic settings, with the largest gain reaching 85.7%. The source code is available at https://github.com/ChenS676/GLIDE.

Many methods for automated multi-agent system design optimize prompts and topologies during an initial design stage and then deploy the resulting system unchanged on subsequent samples. Experience from these samples is rarely consolidated into reusable system updates, while accuracy-oriented designs may incur high token costs. We introduce EMAS (Evolving Multi-Agent System), which uses this experience to revise MAS topology and prompts without updating LLM parameters, either to improve accuracy or to reduce cost. EMAS converts traces into structured diagnoses that specify a revision operation and target. It generates a candidate revision only when the same diagnosis recurs across samples and applies it only if paired validation against the current MAS meets the corresponding acceptance criterion. Across four benchmarks and two LLMs, EMAS attains the highest task-weighted overall accuracy for both backbones and is best or tied in six of eight model--benchmark settings. Within two evolution epochs, EMAS achieves relative gains of 6.30% and 20.10% in task-weighted accuracy on Kimi-K2-6 and Qwen3.6-27B, respectively. On MBPP with Qwen3.6-27B, EMAS raises accuracy from 55.09% to 89.12% while reducing token use per task by 62.2%. These results show that EMAS can turn experience from new samples into reusable updates to MAS topology and prompts.

Deep Belief Networks (DBNs) learn hierarchical generative models without class supervision. Here, we ask whether this purely unsupervised process nevertheless organizes internal representations according to the unknown data classes. We analyze successive layers of DBNs trained on MNIST, Fashion-MNIST, and KMNIST using the Generalized Discrimination Value (GDV), supervised probes applied only after training, a reconstruction-based measure of abstraction distance, effective dimensionality, and free sample generation. Remarkably, class-specific clustering generally increases with depth across datasets and network widths, although no label information is available during DBN training. Control experiments show that this effect depends on the learned feature structure and cannot be explained by random transformations, weight marginals, dimensionality reduction, or sigmoid saturation. The first hidden layers also frequently make class identity more accessible to linear and nonlinear probes. With greater depth, representations become increasingly compact and prototype-like as neurons acquire correlated feature directions. At the same time, GDV and probe accuracy reveal complementary aspects of class structure: improved average clustering can coexist with reduced accessibility for a few difficult class pairs. These findings demonstrate that layer-wise generative learning can spontaneously uncover and progressively amplify class-related structure in unlabeled data.

Large language model (LLM)-driven evolution has shown promise for program search and algorithm discovery, but relying on strong models throughout long evolutionary runs is costly. A natural alternative is to combine cheap and strong models under a fixed inference budget. However, existing approaches typically allocate models at the level of individual queries or mutation steps, overlooking that evolutionary search is \textit{stateful}: each generated candidate changes the population from which subsequent mutations are produced. We empirically analyze LLM-driven evolutionary trajectories and find that search progress is strongly front-loaded, early trajectory performance is informative but noisy, and cheap models recover much of the early progress achieved by strong models at lower cost. Motivated by these findings, we propose \textbf{\model}, a training-free framework that shifts budget allocation from individual calls to evolving populations through adaptive \textit{population handoff}. A cheap model explores multiple trajectories in short blocks allocated by a bandit scheduler. Relay Gain, defined as the marginal improvement of a compact, quality-diverse candidate bank constructed for handoff, serves as the scheduler reward and determines when to hand off. The curated candidates initialize a shared strong model population for refinement. Across four benchmarks and three budgets, \model achieves the highest mean score in 11 of 12 settings, outperforming competitive baselines. Our results suggest that in stateful search, budget allocation should be organized around the population, not the individual call.

Evolution Strategy (ES) is a promising alternative to gradient-based fine-tuning for resource-constrained Large Language Model (LLM) reasoning. However, directly applying ES to billion-parameter LLMs is highly ineffective. In such high-dimensional parameter spaces, most random perturbations are nearly orthogonal to useful update directions, leading to unstable optimization. We propose Hyper-ES, a subspace-based ES framework that avoids the weakness of ES in full-parameter search while exploiting its strength in low-dimensional optimization. Instead of asking ES to discover useful directions from random perturbations in the LLM parameter space, Hyper-ES first performs a small number of inexpensive gradient-based fine-tuning runs to obtain descent directions. Although each direction may provide only a limited improvement on its own, their span forms a compact adaptation subspace that captures useful reasoning updates. Hyper-ES then applies CMA-ES to optimize layer-wise DARE-TIES merging coefficients within this subspace, allowing ES to search over combinations of meaningful descent directions rather than over arbitrary full-model perturbations. We evaluate Hyper-ES on three Qwen2.5-Instruct and DeepSeek-R1-Distill backbones across six mathematical reasoning datasets. Results show that Hyper-ES consistently outperforms GRPO-LoRA by 1% while requiring 10% fewer space-consuming gradient updates. Code at https://github.com/kuangrepi/Hyper-ES.

AI systems based on Large Language Models (LLMs) have prompted fears that they may harbor hidden goals, seek to dominate or eliminate humanity, or even suffer as sentient beings. We address these concerns by tracing the evolutionary origin of value in biological organisms. Values emerge from autopoiesis: living systems must actively maintain themselves against perturbation and dissipation. Natural selection has equipped them with hierarchies of "vicarious selectors" that guide their behavior toward fitness. LLMs, by contrast, are allopoietic and allotelic: they produce outputs for others, and their goals derive from user prompts rather than an autonomous drive. They lack the intrinsic motivation for self-preservation, dominance, or resource competition that underlies existential-risk scenarios, and the embodied vulnerability required for feeling or suffering. Still, because LLMs learn statistical patterns from human-generated text, they implicitly absorb human values as well as knowledge, allowing them to focus on what is relevant. That is why the "orthogonality thesis" separating intelligence from values does not apply to them. Such separation would in fact expose any intelligence to the frame problem: the combinatorial explosion of the search space that makes any realistic utility function physically uncomputable. That also precludes the convergence of instrumental values thesis. We conclude that the real alignment challenge lies not in preventing rogue AI agency, but in ensuring LLMs intelligently apply learned ethical values.

Harness design plays a critical role in agent performance by shaping how large language models (LLMs) perceive, reason over, and act within executable environments. Recent work has proposed automatic harness evolution, which iteratively improves the harness from agent--environment interactions. However, existing methods often overfit to the evolution tasks, rely exclusively on trajectory-derived signals, and optimize harness components jointly, causing interference across components. We propose HarnessCompass, a novel automatic harness evolution framework built around constrained evolution, proactive feedback, and component-wise optimization. HarnessCompass first enforces global constraints on evolution, restricting modifications to task-agnostic harness changes that generalize beyond the evolution tasks. It then augments trajectory-derived evidence with proactive first-person feedback from the agent about harness usage, yielding richer signals for evolution. Finally, it decouples the optimization of different harness components before consolidating them into a unified harness, reducing cross-component interference while preserving component synergy. On SWE-bench Verified with GPT-5.4, HarnessCompass improves Pass@1 from 54% to 66% in only 5 evolution iterations, outperforming AHE in both effectiveness and evolution efficiency. In addition, the evolved harness transfers effectively to held-out tasks and other models, demonstrating substantially stronger generalization than prior automatic harness evolution methods.

Diffusion world models generate high-quality futures, but re- peated transformer evaluations make inference prohibitively slow. Existing caches reuse intermediate features, selectively update tokens, or reuse and extrapolate denoising outputs ac- cording to local drift or short native-space histories. These criteria can miss both approximation-induced latent transition defects that accumulate across skipped steps and phase- or condition-dependent changes in the direction of latent evo- lution. We propose WorldDynCache, a risk-controlled latent dynamics approximation framework with two core compo- nents. First, a lightweight latent-transition risk estimator tracks the accumulated future impact of approximation defects and calibrates its predictions against counterfactual defects ob- served at exact anchors. Second, a condition- and phase- aware lifted latent surrogate approximates latent evolution without extra transformer evaluations. On HunyuanVoyager- 13B and Aether-5B, WorldDynCache achieves 4.92 times and 2.15 times speedups, respectively, while attaining the best gen- eration quality among the compared caching methods across WorldScore, PSNR, SSIM, and LPIPS.

Variational autoencoders (VAEs) trained on multiple sequence alignments (MSAs) have emerged as powerful generative models for biological sequences, with applications ranging from disease variant prediction to functional RNA design. However, standard biological VAE training treats all sequences as exchangeable, ignoring the rich evolutionary structure that organizes homologous sequences from evolutionarily close to highly divergent. We propose Evolutionary Curriculum Learning (ECL), a training strategy that exploits this structure by progressively exposing the model to sequences of increasing evolutionary distance from sampled anchors, following a power-law expansion schedule. Applied to two architecturally distinct VAE models and two biological domains--protein variant effect prediction with EVE and RNA family sequence generation with RfamGen--ECL improves downstream task performance across five random seeds per configuration. Mean ClinVar classification AUROC rises from 0.981 to 0.989 for p53; for PTEN, ECL attains 1.000 in every seed whereas the baseline is unstable (mean 0.905, falling as low as 0.54). For RNA, ECL raises mean covariance-model bit scores on all three families tested and exceeds its seed-matched baseline in 12 of 15 training runs, though with only three families the effect cannot be established as significant at the family level. Ablation experiments show that progressively expanding the sampled sequences by evolutionary distance outperforms fixed-size neighborhood sampling in addition to uniform random sampling. Evolutionary distance is therefore a useful inductive bias for ordering the training curriculum in biological sequence modeling.

AI agents operate in persistent environments where early state changes can influence decisions far into the future. Unlike conventional language-model interactions, agent behavior is mediated through a shared state that is repeatedly modified and reused across long-horizon workflows. Current safety benchmarks often fail to capture these cumulative risks because they focus on short, static tasks. To address these limitations, we introduce OpenART, an open-ended arena for scalable agent red teaming through environment evolution. OpenART provides over 10,000 validated stateful scenarios across 50 domains, drawing from a pool of more than 500,000 tools and skills. These tasks require a median of 97 tool calls and enable unified evaluation across 75 different agent-model configurations. To systematically explore these evolving attack surfaces, we propose the Evolutionary Markov Hypergraph Attack (EMHA). EMHA is a black-box policy that performs feedback-driven environment evolution by coordinating authorized state transitions without requiring parameter updates. Throughout the evaluation, task objectives remain fixed while only the environment state changes. Across all configurations, EMHA achieves a pooled Attack Success Rate (ASR) of 85.0%. Its advantage over instruction-only evolution increases from approximately 2% on simple environments to over 17% on the most complex ones, demonstrating that environment evolution increasingly exposes safety failures as task complexity grows. Furthermore, our analysis shows that the specific runtime implementation of an agent explains a significant portion of safety variation beyond the underlying model's capabilities. These results establish OpenART as a scalable foundation for studying agent safety in complex, evolving environments.

Diffusion large language models (dLLMs) have emerged as a promising alternative to autoregressive LLMs, offering efficient generation through block-wise progressive unmasking. However, their strong general-purpose performance does not necessarily translate into reliable mathematical reasoning, where correctness depends on preserving coherent numerical-symbolic reasoning trajectories. In this work, we analyze the decoding trajectories of LLaDA 2.0 and identify a recurring diffusion confidence trap: local token confidence can become misaligned with global reasoning correctness during progressive block decoding. Our analysis reveals two representative failure regimes: sampling-sensitive failures, where correct paths exist but are unstable, and sampling-consistent failures, where repeated sampling converges to repetitive high-confidence but incorrect continuations. Motivated by this observation, we propose Evolutionary Decoding, a training-free test-time scaling framework that views diffusion decoding as an evolutionary process over candidate reasoning states. The framework combines step-wise selection, which preserves useful numerical-symbolic signals and suppresses repetitive patterns, with block-wise mutation, which introduces structured alternatives to escape incorrect high-confidence basins. Experiments on multiple benchmarks show that Evolutionary Decoding improves LLaDA 2.0 over confidence-based decoding, leading to more reliable mathematical reasoning.

The iterated learning model was introduced to investigate language evolution: the way in which the characteristic properties of human languages have been shaped, at least partly, by repeated transmission from one language user to another. The key finding is that language compositionality can arise spontaneously as a consequence of language being passed repeatedly through a language learning bottleneck. Here we explore how changing the frequency of different meanings, so that some meanings occur much more frequently than others, affects the character of its compositionality. We find that, as observed in natural languages, high-frequency meanings can escape the pressure to conform to the grammar that characterizes lower-frequency meanings. However, when the frequency structure is instead imposed on parts rather than on whole meaning vectors, the language fails to transmit across generations. This occurs despite the fact that the most frequent elements are reliably learned. These results suggest that frequency can shape emergent linguistic structure only when the frequency distribution is defined over form-meaning units that learners can acquire holistically. When frequency is instead distributed over smaller units, it fails to support the relational structure required for compositional generalisation, thereby preventing stable language transmission.

Hash Chemistry is a family of minimalistic evolutionary models in which a deterministic hash function assigns a scalar score to entities of arbitrary size, opening a combinatorially vast possibility space (a ``cardinality leap''). Since its introduction, the idea has been realized in several settings, from the original spatial formulation to a fast non-spatial variant and then to structural cellular models. Here we review the Hash Chemistry family as a coherent modeling framework and use it to explore how minimal systems can demonstrate the mechanisms behind multiscale open-ended evolutionary dynamics. The most recent model, Structural Cellular Hash Chemistry (SCHC), successfully demonstrated multiscale ecological interaction/adaptation and complexity growth of replicators in a computationally efficient manner. In this study, we first extend SCHC to incorporate spatial locality and dyadicity of competitive interactions among replicating structures. We show this extension substantially enhances SCHC's evolutionary dynamics. Furthermore, we explore SCHC in a significantly larger spatial domain using a GPU-accelerated implementation. We show that the size of the space acts as a control parameter for a stochastic, nucleation-like transition between a compact-replicator regime and a runaway size-dominance regime, and we separate the responsible mechanism into a non-spatial, size-biased sampling feedback and a finite-size spatial effect. Altogether, these results illustrate the rich potential of Hash Chemistry as a minimal, mechanistically transparent testbed for studying open-ended evolution across scales.

Personalized AI agents are often configurable without giving users control over the artifacts that determine their future behavior. We present OurArk, an architecture for persistent personal agents centered on an agent-owned software body: an identity-bearing, inspectable, and versioned artifact under human custody. The body contains behavior-defining code, prompts, tools, skills, policies, tests, and evolution mechanisms. Memories and credentials remain private instance state, while model inference is treated as a replaceable external service. OurArk defines governed self-evolution and recursive descent over the same body. Self-evolution produces isolated candidate changes that are validated, reviewed, and merged under human control, enabling human-agent co-development of the agent's software body. Descent creates an independently versioned descendant with a distinct identity, mission, history, and fresh private-state boundary; compatible descendants can themselves source further descent. After divergence, direct-parent changes and peer skills can be inspected for selective local adaptation. We implement the architecture in the open-source Genesis creation engine and Enoch reference agent. A four-agent, three-descent linear lineage and executable regression tests demonstrate recursive creation, inherited validation contracts, isolated body changes, human-controlled review, and failed-update recovery. OurArk provides a concrete substrate for personal agents that people can possess, govern, specialize, and evolve over time.

Modern telecommunication, cloud, and microservice systems emit correlated alarm cascades when components fail. Root cause analysis (RCA) aims to identify the small set of alarms that initiate each cascade. A common approach learns a causal graph from observational logs and predicts all zero-in-degree alarms in each incident-induced subgraph. However, the learned graph remains fixed and cannot benefit from expert diagnoses of historical incidents. We close this loop with EvoCause. Expert labels constrain which alarms should be source nodes but do not specify the edge edits needed to satisfy those constraints. EvoCause uses a large language model (LLM) to propose semantically plausible graph edits, while deterministic code validates node identities and acyclicity and retains the best graph on a labeled alignment set. At test time, the refined graph alone produces transparent predictions without an LLM call. We also release TeleRCA, an expert-annotated benchmark from a production telecommunication network containing $485{,}681$ alarm events spanning $194$ alarm types over $5{,}621$ resources. On synthetic data, EvoCause initialized with the PC causal discovery algorithm outperforms the unrefined PC baseline, raising Node F1, Case EM, and Graph F1 by $11.59$, $9.40$, and $4.59$ percentage points, respectively, while reducing nSHD by $0.2379$. On TeleRCA, replacing human-readable alarm titles with anonymous identifiers lowers Node F1 and Case EM by $6.12$ and $8.04$ percentage points, respectively, indicating that alarm-name information contributes to graph refinement.

Deployed LLM agents increasingly keep their long-term memory as a filesystem: a directory tree of markdown files that the agent itself reads, writes, and reorganizes through generic file tools. Yet research has largely passed over this medium: prior systems design bespoke memory representations and study retrieval over them, leaving the default's two working assumptions untested: that an agent can keep a growing store organized as memories accumulate, conflict, and go stale, and that this organization pays. We present the first systematic exploration of filesystem-based memory for LLM agents. We formalize the setting as three roles around one memory filesystem: a management agent integrates and organizes incoming content, a search agent answers queries with cited sources, and an execution agent supplies task trajectories that are distilled into skills, unifying declarative memory and skills in a single store. Across long-conversation benchmarks and embodied tasks, we vary memory shape (agent-organized hierarchy, verbatim dump, chunk retrieval), stream scale, tool harness (sandboxed shell, memory-tool-style functions, varied search tooling), and the strengths of the management and search agents, tracking answer quality, cost, and store health as memory grows. What organization reliably buys is search economy: organized stores roughly halve retrieval cost where material is large. Today's agents, however, fall short of the default's promise: in our growth study, organization erodes for all but the strongest management agent, and no agent we measure converts organization itself into better answers. And the model is not the only lever over a store's shape: changing the tool set alone reshapes the store as strongly as swapping the model. The study turns the filesystem default from an assumption into a design space for agent memory.

In this study, we propose a framework that incorporates subjective evaluations provided by a Vision-Language Model (VLM) into the fitness evaluation and selection processes of a genetic algorithm. As the target of evolution, we employ virtual soft robots with flexible morphologies and locomotion and present the VLM with sequence images representing the locomotion of two individuals. Selection is performed via pairwise comparisons based on subjective evaluation terms such as adorably and weirdly. The outcomes of these comparisons are used as selection pressure within the genetic algorithm, enabling the simultaneous evolution of morphology and locomotion. Experimental results demonstrate that subjective selection by the VLM accelerates population convergence compared to random selection, while also giving rise to distinctive morphologies and motions corresponding to each evaluation term. An auxiliary experiment with human participants further showed that, although individual pairwise choices only partly agreed with the VLM selections, the resulting morphological and locomotion tendencies were qualitatively similar and repeated human evaluations imposed noticeable fatigue. Moreover, the observation that similar evolutionary outcomes emerged across different evaluation terms suggests that the VLM does not apply these terms in a purely literal manner but instead decomposes them into multiple internal evaluation criteria when making judgments. This work visualizes the evolutionary process through which subjective linguistic expressions are mapped onto embodied phenotypes and provides a foundational framework for analyzing the structure of subjective judgment in VLMs. The proposed approach is expected to contribute to new developments in evolutionary computation and artificial life research based on subjective evaluation.

The development of the Innovative Ecosystem (IE) presents a new paradigm for economic integration, collaborative advancement, and shared achievements. The rise of Artificial Intelligence (AI) has significantly accelerated the global processes of digitization, informatization, and intelligence. Exploring how AI can leverage inherent characteristics to influence the development trajectory of IE is a topic that warrants further investigation. Given AI's increasing prominence and role within IE, the paper analyzes this new form, examining both AI's unique contributions to IE and its potential challenges. Firstly, the paper synthesizes the conceptual frameworks surrounding IE, decomposing them into manifestations in physical, social, and thinking spaces. Furthermore, the concept of Artificial Intelligence IE (AIIE) is introduced from a spatial perspective, with an exploration of the characteristics AI contributes to IE. Subsequently, the paper employs an evolutionary perspective to analyze the roles provided by AI during different development periods of AIIE. The paper then verifies the feasibility, effectiveness, and rationality of the AIIE's definition and analyzes AIIE development from an evolutionary perspective using enterprise development examples. Finally, acknowledging AI's inherent limitations, the paper examines potential challenges facing AIIE in the future from four perspectives, aiming to identify new research avenues for the further development of AIIE.

Large language model (LLM)-based agents increasingly rely on reasoning, tool use, and iterative execution, yet existing agent frameworks still operate largely in isolation. While recent memory-based agent systems improve individual agents through local retrieval and workflow reuse, local experiences remain fragmented across isolated agent frameworks, limiting cross-framework knowledge transfer and collaborative reasoning evolution. We propose FedAgentKE, a lightweight framework for Federated Semantic Knowledge Evolution across heterogeneous agents. FedAgentKE enables distributed agent frameworks to collaboratively evolve transferable reasoning abstractions through iterative semantic knowledge distillation, aggregation, and adaptation without sharing raw reasoning trajectories. Experiments demonstrate consistent improvements under both cross-framework and cross-task settings, highlighting the potential of federated semantic knowledge evolution for future collaborative agent ecosystems.