LLM Agent Self-Improvement

LLM: Large Language Model

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44 papers in the last four weeks, up 267% on the four weeks before. 0.4% of all new papers.

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Latest papers 189

Aug 11, 2026cs.CL

Better, Faster, Stronger: Programmatic Skill Learning Best Reduces Agent Cost

Recently, the practice of augmenting LLM agent capability with skills has gained prevalence. We explore the cost effective adaptation of agents to novel domains by means of learning skills. Existing works focus on performance gain over cost effectiveness. As a result, little is known about what skill learning strategies save cost. We argue that among all the different skill learning methods, those that view skills as programs can achieve the best cost reduction. By executing sequences of actions deterministically, a program-augmented agent can reliably and cheaply achieve goals that would otherwise require trial and error and risk degenerate behavior over long horizons. An agent can learn at inference time by incrementally discovering these programs and equipping them for future tasks. We hypothesize that past trajectories contain enough signal to guide skill learning, even without replay or validation, provided the agent can learn to analyze them. To test our claims, we propose SpeedRunner, a coding agent that analyzes trajectories and refactors skills for better performance on future tasks. Across three different embodied environments, we show that SpeedRunner consistently achieves the frontier in learning and cost reduction while remaining robust against distribution shifts and environmental randomness.

Zixi Huang, Xiheng Wang, Andrew Wang +4

Johns Hopkins University

LLM Agent Self-Improvement LLM Agent Skill Learning Embodied AI

Aug 10, 2026cs.AI

Emotion2Skill: Model-Internal Emotion Signals for Adaptive Skill Selection and Evolution

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.

Bohan Lin, Hejia Geng, Xinyi Xie +5

University of Science and Technology of China (USTC) · 2Suzhou Institute for Advanced Research, USTC · University of Oxford +2

LLM Agent Self-Improvement LLM Agent Skill Learning LLM Agent Skill Retrieval

Aug 10, 2026cs.DB

SiriusDeliver: Automating Data Warehouse Delivery at Tencent

Enterprise data warehouses (DWs) support business-critical analytics, but warehouse task delivery remains a complicated production process involving context retrieval, workflow configuration, code generation, platform submission, and failure diagnosis. Although large language models (LLMs) and coding agents have improved software development, they are insufficient for production DW delivery, which requires dependency-aware orchestration, lifecycle-aware artifact control, and continuous adaptation to evolving platform practices. We present SiriusDeliver, an end-to-end delivery automation agent for production warehouse task submission. SiriusDeliver integrates three components: a hierarchical delivery agent that orchestrates warehouse skills, an artifact lifecycle control module that verifies and revises artifacts before and after platform execution, and a trace-driven skill evolution mechanism that maintains reusable skills from delivery trajectories. We evaluate SiriusDeliver through offline datasets and large-scale production deployment on Tencent Cloud WeData. Offline experiments on real-world warehouse delivery cases show that SiriusDeliver improves delivery success and automation efficiency over representative baselines. During a two-month deployment across 6 business teams and 4 warehouse task types, SiriusDeliver served 3,600 monthly active users and supported 18,240 delivery sessions, achieving an 87.2% end-to-end success rate and a 73.5% autonomous submission rate. A one-month A/B test shows that SiriusDeliver reduces median delivery time from 228 to 23 minutes and engineer effort from 95 to 11 minutes, while maintaining comparable final delivery success.

Haining Xie, Xiaokai Zhou, Jiaming Yang +12

TEG, Tencent Inc. · Wuhan University

LLM Agent Orchestration LLM Agent Self-Improvement Workflow Automation

Aug 10, 2026cs.CL

Social Gym and SPaRTan: Benchmarking and Improving LLM Social Reasoning via Multi-Agent Game Tournaments

LLM agents are increasingly deployed in multi-agent social settings where they must cooperate, negotiate, and adapt to other agents. Measuring and improving these social skills is hard because, unlike math or logic, social interaction offers no objective ground truth: evaluations fall back on LLM judges, which are costly, subjective, and noisy, and models get no reliable signal to learn from. To address both, we first introduce Social Gym, an environment of 21 multi-agent social games (e.g., Werewolves, Resistance, Spyfall) whose rule-decided outcomes make agent performance verifiable and objective, with an Elo tournament that produces a cross-game leaderboard. Benchmarking experiments show that while GPT-5-mini tops the leaderboard, no model excels at all games uniformly or in all game roles, pointing to limitations of social reasoning. Motivated by this, we additionally propose SPaRTan (Self-Play and Reflect-Transfer), a training-free self-improvement loop: a model plays a game, reflects on its trajectories and their outcomes to produce a transferable playbook, and applies that playbook in subsequent games. Our results show that SPaRTan playbooks help GPT-5-mini agents level their performance on weaker roles, but largely do not improve Qwen3-32B's performance. Together, Social Gym and SPaRTan offer a reproducible, verifiable foundation for measuring and improving LLM social reasoning without weight updates.

Keyu He, Xuhui Zhou, Maarten Sap

Carnegie Mellon University

Game-Playing Agents LLM Agent Evaluation LLM Agent Self-Improvement AI Agent Benchmarks Large Language Model-Based Social Simulation Social Reasoning

Aug 10, 2026cs.CL

Tree-of-Experience: Hierarchical Experience Management for Self-Evolving Agents

Continual self-evolution requires LLM agents to transform environmental interactions into reliable and reusable experience. Existing methods typically refine individual trajectories or abstract shared knowledge from related trajectories, but their experience representations are often disconnected from the underlying reasoning process. This limits feedback attribution, cross-task transfer, and update and retrieval efficiency, particularly in complex reasoning tasks with outcome-level feedback. To overcome this limitation, we propose \textbf{T}ree-\textbf{o}f-\textbf{E}xperience (ToE), a structured experience-management framework that aligns experience organization with the hierarchical reasoning process of LLM agents. Specifically, ToE organizes the experience into a shared tree of analytical perspectives and reasoning paths, whose reliability is calibrated through environmental outcomes to support systematic updating, transfer, and efficient retrieval. The experimental results on \textsc{Game of 24} and \textsc{FinEvolveBench} show that ToE substantially improves both problem-solving performance and efficiency. On \textsc{Game of 24}, ToE achieves a 31.4% relative improvement in accuracy over the experience-free ToT baseline. On \textsc{FinEvolveBench}, ToE improves tsIC by an average of 41.24% over the experience-free pipeline across 12 evaluation settings, whereas conventional experience-management methods often underperform experience-free baselines.

Zihao Deng, Yining Zhu, Leiming Wang +6

Continual Learning for LLM Agents LLM Agent Self-Improvement Self-Evolving Agents Memory-Augmented Language Model Agents

Aug 9, 2026cs.AI

Hierarchical Self-Improvement: A Framework for Task-Specific Evolvable Agent Harnesses

Modern LLM agents are often improved by modifying prompts, tools, or workflows manually, while the executable scaffold surrounding the model---the \emph{harness}---is typically treated as a fixed artifact after deployment. This work studies an alternative where the harness is \emph{task-specific and continuously evolvable}: each task family maintains its own harness, which is hot-swapped across iterations through a fixed task-injection seam and rewritten using environment feedback. We introduce \textbf{Hierarchical Self-Improvement (HSI)}, a framework in which a single frozen LLM

M

operates across three hierarchical scopes: a task harness

H

that executes tasks, an evolver that rewrites

H

, and a meta-evolver that rewrites the evolver's strategy code under a frozen outer anchor. A thinking-on/off design isolates the contribution of harness evolution by disabling reasoning during task execution while enabling it during self-modification. HSI is bounded by two factors: a \emph{feedback-fidelity bound}, since evolution requires informative reward signals to guide selection, and a \emph{backbone capability bound}, since harness redesign cannot overcome limitations of the frozen model. On BALROG with DeepSeek-V4-Flash-Preview as the frozen backbone, HSI achieves consistent gains over the initial harness on moderate-difficulty tasks (

+39.3

on BabyAI,

+33.0

on Crafter,

+25.0

on TextWorld, and

+15.0

on MiniHack, all in raw % Progress), while obtaining strong held-out generalization on BabaIsAI sub-suites (

0.98

best-test on BreakStop and

1.00

on GoTo from a

20\%

unseen split). On tasks beyond the backbone's capability (NLE), harness evolution provides no improvement. These results demonstrate task-specific harness evolution as a viable axis for improving frozen LLM agents under clear empirical limits. Code is available at https://github.com/TailinZhou/hsi.

Tailin Zhou

HKUST

Agent Harness Optimization LLM Agent Self-Improvement LLM Agents

Aug 8, 2026cs.SE

Ouroboros: A Self-Developing Frontier Coding Agent with Reviewed Core Evolution

We present Ouroboros, a self-developing agent harness whose tools, prompts, context assembly, and core implementation improve through reviewed commits that become the runtime for later work. Core evolution proceeds in two modes. In recursive free evolution, improvement is itself a task, and completing one evolution cycle can schedule the next. In experience-driven core evolution, ordinary work and social interaction expose bugs, rough edges, and inefficient context construction that lead to reviewed structural changes. On Terminal-Bench 2.1, an Opus 5 run scores 86.74%, the best result reported on the benchmark. On OSWorld-Verified, an Opus 5 run reaches 90.69%, exceeding the best previously reported score. A five-rollout CL-Bench campaign achieves a normalized reward of 0.2301, setting a new state of the art. Hope is the longest-running publicly documented Ouroboros deployment. It is a 161-day living agent experiment in free evolution under governed human communication across seven surfaces. Human interaction surfaces faults and generates proposals, but the agent decides which changes to pursue. Because a self-developing agent may rewrite its own code and select new model APIs, operational safety becomes a primary design problem: guardrails must remain authoritative under evolutionary and public social pressure. Benchmark campaigns use frozen system snapshots, while Hope continues live evolution on a separate lineage.

Anton Razzhigaev, Andrei Gritsaev, Andrei Kaznacheev +3

1Lomonosov Moscow State University · 2Skolkovo Institute of Science and Technology · 4FusionBrain Lab at AIRI +2

AI Coding Agents Agent Harness Optimization LLM Agent Self-Improvement AI Agent Safety Self-Evolving Agents

Aug 8, 2026cs.AI

SkillSmith: Enhancing Locally Deployed Agents via Automatic Skill Construction and Evolution

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.

Xinle Jiang, Remy Xie, Ming Tang

Southern University of Science and Technology, China · AOE Tech Labs Ltd., Hong Kong

LLM Agent Self-Improvement LLM Agent Skill Learning LLM Agents

Aug 7, 2026cs.AI

Towards Researcher Agents for Knowledge-Graph Question Answering

Translating a natural-language question into a SPARQL query that can be executed against a large knowledge graph requires resolving lexical ambiguity, grounding surface terms in the target ontology, and producing graph patterns that are both syntactically valid and semantically faithful. We present an agentic text-to-SPARQL system that goes one step beyond static tool-using agents: a researcher agent that, after each round of inference on a validation set, proposes and tests changes to its own prompts, rules, and tool-orchestration code. We instantiate the loop on DBpedia, evolve nine successive versions of the agent driven by a low-cost reasoning model, and deploy the best-performing configuration with two stronger backbone models. The study yields three observations: (i) self-improvement converges quickly and then achieves 0.22 overall accuracy on the 2025 DBpedia validation set; (ii) the bottleneck is consistently in basic-graph-pattern predicate selection, not in SPARQL syntax or modifiers; and (iii) several benchmark items appear to penalise correct queries due to property ambiguity in DBpedia, suggesting that future Text-to-SPARQL benchmarks should be scored using a combination of machine translation and information retrieval metrics.

Tommaso Soru, Abdulsobur Oyewale

1Liber AI Research, London, United Kingdom

LLM Agent Self-Improvement Knowledge Graph Question Answering Natural Language to SPARQL Autonomous Research Agents

Aug 7, 2026cs.AI

SkillProx: Self-Evolving Agent Skills via Proximal Textual Gradient Descent

LLM agents increasingly adapt to recurring tasks by accumulating procedural knowledge in skills. These skills are lightweight, reusable textual artifacts that are loaded into the agent's context without weight updates. Recent methods refine skills through iterative task execution, failure diagnosis, and trajectory-guided text-space updates. However, existing frameworks lack explicit diagnosis--outcome feedback and treat deletion as a generic edit operation rather than a dedicated mechanism for consolidating accumulated knowledge. We introduce SkillProx, a proximal-gradient-inspired forward--backward framework that couples closed-loop diagnostic evolution with utility-aware proximal refinement. Motivated by a composite objective balancing task loss and skill complexity, the forward stage re-executes diagnosis-driven edits on the same task batch, rolls back regressions, and feeds measured outcomes into subsequent diagnoses. The backward stage decomposes the resulting skill into auditable knowledge units, estimates their contributions using a frozen leave-one-out utility audit, and applies validation-gated consolidation, demotion, or removal. Experiments on in-distribution and out-of-distribution benchmarks across multiple backbone LLMs show that SkillProx improves average accuracy by 3.0 percentage points over the strongest gradient-based baseline. Component ablations demonstrate the complementary effects of closed-loop diagnosis and proximal refinement.

Mingxuan Zheng, Yujin Zhou, Chuxue Cao +6

Hong Kong University of Science and Technology · Macau University

LLM Agent Self-Improvement LLM Agent Skill Learning

Aug 7, 2026cs.AI

Mendel Gödel Machine: Recursive Self-Improving Coding Agents via Comparative Evolution

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.

Changzhi Liu, Yilun Liu, Sikuan Yan +2

University of Electronic Science and Technology of China · Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich · Munich Center for Machine Learning

Coding Agents Genetic Programming LLM Agent Self-Improvement Recursive Self-Improvement

Aug 6, 2026cs.AI

SkillHEX: Improving Agent Skills via Hypothesis-Driven Autonomous Exploration and Exploitation

Although agent skills equip LLMs with reusable procedural knowledge, manual maintenance suffers from high costs, unscalability, and misalignment. Real-world deployments thus require autonomous, on-demand skill evolution at test time, constrained by limited interaction budgets and a lack of training or validation sets. This setting introduces a severe sparse reward challenge, where outcomes conflate multiple latent failure causes. Under such ambiguity, existing methods that greedily refine a single incumbent skill are particularly vulnerable to an exploitation trap, allowing early misdiagnoses to exhaust limited trials along unproductive trajectories. To address this, we introduce SkillHEX, a closed-loop framework coupling hypothesis-driven self-verification with evidence-guided tree search. SkillHEX translates falsifiable failure hypotheses into executable tests, producing diagnostic evidence as dense reward without additional environment attempts. This evidence guides a search over persistent skill-revision branches, dynamically balancing the exploitation of supported edits with the exploration of plausible alternatives. Evaluated on 87 tasks from SkillsBench, SkillHEX outperforms existing self-evolving methods and achieves an average pass rate of 55.9% and 57.9% using GPT-5.3-Codex and Claude Opus 4.7 under a five-iteration budget, respectively.

Yuru Feng, Yaoqi Chen, Beidi Zhao +7

Microsoft · University of California, San Diego · University of Science and Technology of China +1

Test-Time Adaptation LLM Agent Self-Improvement LLM Agent Skill Learning LLM Agent Verification LLM Agent Reliability

Aug 5, 2026cs.AI

Argus: A General-Purpose Agentic Reasoning Runtime for Long-Horizon Tasks

Long-horizon reasoning requires an agentic runtime that can persist when evidence supports its current approach and pivot when measurements reveal failure, hidden constraints, or a misspecified objective. We present Argus, a persistent, self-evolving runtime in which Manager, Planner, Engineer, and Reviewer execute bounded missions over durable project state. Argus separates stable user intent from operational objectives, constraints, and verification criteria, and admits memories, skills, procedures, verifiers, routing decisions, and rejected routes only after role-owned review and, when available, task-native verification. Model weights remain fixed; self-evolution occurs through persistent runtime state and control policy, with autonomous execution between operator-owned escalation points. Across seven GPT-5.5 benchmark arenas, Argus achieves about 78% on SWE-Bench Pro versus 59% for Direct Copilot while using 1.41 times the aggregate tokens. After verification-gated self-evolution, mature SWE-Bench waves use 21% fewer solve-input tokens and 15% less active workflow time per task than startup waves, while recording 34 verifier recoveries and 22 strict review-loop rescues. Argus also reaches 76.8% on AARRI-Bench and a 28.0-point gap on mathematical data synthesis, with competitive GPU-kernel and language-model-training results. Beyond benchmarks, an optimized RWKV6 kernel was merged upstream; a multi-day mathematics campaign retained falsified routes and proof-backed frontier updates; and six paper pipelines completed 254 missions with 16 stage rollbacks. These results show that a fixed-weight, self-evolving harness can revise, recover, and accumulate verified approaches while producing structured trajectories for future supervised and reinforcement learning.

Boxiu Li, Zimo Wen, Yijia Fan +24

Argus Team

LLM Agent Orchestration LLM Agent Self-Improvement Agentic Reasoning Long-Horizon LLM Agents

Aug 5, 2026cs.LG

EvolveNet: Collaborative Harness Evolution for Agent Self-Improvement

The capabilities of an LLM agent depend not only on its model but on the harness: the executable program that constructs context, invokes tools, verifies results, and recovers from failure. Recent work shows that evolving the harness yields persistent improvements without updating model weights. Existing approaches, however, assume that all execution experience can be routed to a single optimizer, which evolves one harness along a sequential trajectory. Real agent ecosystems violate that assumption: users, organizations, and environments generate isolated streams of experience that cannot be pooled, so the experience most worth learning from is exactly the experience that cannot be directly centralized. We introduce EvolveNet, a paradigm of collaborative harness evolution that moves experience extraction to the data. A shared harness is broadcast to data-local agent deployments, each of which evolves it on its own workload. Only the resulting program adaptations are composed into an updated shared harness and redistributed, so that every participating agent inherits operational experience discovered by the others. By shifting the aggregation boundary from raw workloads to learned adaptations, EvolveNet keeps workloads local and allows multiple evolutionary searches to proceed concurrently with reduced serial depth. Because independently modified programs cannot be averaged like model parameters and may conflict when composed, EvolveNet introduces scope-typed, evidence-guided program aggregation. Across five settings spanning text-to-SQL, data-science coding, competitive programming, software engineering, and agentic workflows, EvolveNet improves the shared harness in all five, with the largest gains under heterogeneous workloads, and ablations attribute the improvement to composition of adaptations from different agents rather than to selecting among them.

Jun Nie, Yonggang Zhang, Qianshu Cai +3

Hong Kong Baptist University · The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology · University of Science and Technology of China

Agent Harness Optimization Multi-Agent Collaboration LLM Agent Self-Improvement

Aug 3, 2026cs.AI

Harness-R1: Learning to Edit Executable Runtime Harnesses from Agent Failure Trajectories

Agents built around large language models continually accumulate interaction trajectories during deployment, yet their behavior typically remains fixed. Beyond updating model weights, these trajectories can improve the agent harness that constructs context, mediates tools, validates actions, and recovers execution. We introduce Harness-R1, the first method, to our knowledge, that makes failure-conditioned, lifecycle-wide editing of an existing executable runtime a learned capability. It post-trains a dedicated harness engineer with online reinforcement learning so that its edits are optimized for the realized task success they produce, rather than proposed by a fixed editor. A separate 9B engineer converts batches of target-agent failures into validated executable patches; fresh same-batch reruns of the frozen target provide outcome rewards, so training updates only the engineer. Cold-start supervised fine-tuning initializes this editing policy, which is then trained online with group-relative policy optimization. Across WebShop, ALFWorld, and DBBench, Harness-R1 raises vanilla Qwen3.5-9B success from 44.3% to 53.6% (+9.3 percentage points). After direct target-agent fine-tuning, a target-specific engineer raises the average further from 59.2% to 64.2% (+5.0 points); because these gains hold both before and after fine-tuning the target, Harness-R1 points toward co-evolving the harness engineer and the target agent.

Shuai Shao, Kangning Zhang, Qingyao Li +7

Shanghai Jiao Tong University · Xiaohongshu Inc. · Southeast University

Agent Harness Optimization LLM Agent Self-Improvement LLM Agent Harnesses RL for LLM Agents

Aug 2, 2026cs.AI

Learning What to Remember and What to Internalize in LLM Self-Evolution via Adaptive Memory-Parameter Coordination

Large language model agents increasingly operate in dynamic environments where tool interfaces, APIs, and user requirements change after deployment. Existing self-evolution methods mainly follow two paradigms: harness-based approaches, which externalize feedback into editable memories or skills for rapid adaptation, and parameter-based approaches, which internalize experience into model parameters for deeper capability improvement. However, using either mechanism alone creates a trade-off between flexibility and performance. This paper asks how an agent can coordinate both channels to achieve robust self-evolution. We present COVE, a unified agent self-evolution framework that combines harness-based and parameter-based learning through task-aware routing, stage-aware scheduling, and knowledge optimization. Through this design, COVE treats self-evolution not as indiscriminate accumulation of experience, but as a coordinated process that matches tasks and knowledge types to appropriate learning mechanisms. Experiments across multiple task categories show that COVE outperforms single-channel evolution strategies, demonstrating more robust and efficient improvement under changing environments.

Tianyun Ji, Zhenya Huang, Jiayu Liu +3

University of Science and Technology of China Hefei, Anhui, China · City University of Hong Kong Hong Kong, China · Hefei Normal University Hefei, Anhui, China +1

Continual Learning for LLM Agents Agent Harness Optimization LLM Agent Self-Improvement Self-Evolving Agents

Jul 31, 2026cs.NE

DarwinX: Evolving Agent Harnesses Through Natural Selection

An LLM agent's capability depends not only on model weights but on its harness: prompts, tools, skills, and control flow. Self-improvement loops already edit harnesses, yet single-lineage search is path-dependent and local wins often regress other tasks. We introduce DarwinX, which treats self-evolution as selection over a population of harnesses with the model frozen: a preserve-and-extend contract admits only variants that extend coverage without regressing, an archive keeps alternative lineages for recombination, and failure-, teacher-, and self-derived evidence share one edit interface. Fitness comes from each benchmark's own verifier: no gold solutions, no hand-picked winners. Across four benchmarks that progressively separate the evolution signal from the test, one loop adds about 17 points on average: Terminal-Bench 2.1 rises +7.7 to 83.2% on a matched base and to the verified frontier at 84.7% on a stronger one; TerminalWorld's held-out split reaches 68.3%, ahead of every off-the-shelf agent; WebArena-Infinity real-task pass@1 rises from 43.5% to 93.0% audit-clean; and a Terminal-Bench 2.1 harness transfers unchanged to SWE-bench Verified. What evolves is general agent competence, not benchmark-specific patches, so it survives changes of task, verifier, and base model. A frozen model need not be a fixed agent: harness selection turns evaluation compute into durable capability.

Yifan Zhang, Yutong Dai, Juntao Tan +9

1Salesforce AI Research · 2Salesforce Agentforce

Evolutionary Optimization Agent Harness Optimization LLM Agent Self-Improvement Self-Evolving Agents

Jul 30, 2026cs.CL

Self-Supervised Skill Optimization

Agent skills provide frozen large language model (LLM) agents with reusable procedural guidance, and recent work shows that such skills can be optimized with ground-truth (GT) feedback. Many applications, however, lack GT labels, task scores, rewards, or reliable task-specific evaluators. We therefore introduce Self-Supervised Skill Optimization (SSO), a comparative framework that learns a reusable skill from unlabeled task instances alone. At each step, SSO runs the current skill on an unlabeled batch, uses a subset of the resulting executions to generate complete skill probes, and runs the probes on the same batch. An LLM judge compares the resulting answers, trajectories, artifacts, or terminal states. A separate behavior extractor identifies behavioral differences without seeing the judge's decisions. SSO uses these decisions to aggregate evidence for and against the observed behaviors across instances. It then ranks the behaviors by the resulting evidence and renders a new complete skill from the highest-ranked behaviors. The update is accepted only if the new skill outperforms the current one on an unlabeled validation set. SSO outperforms existing GT-free prompt optimizers on both closed-ended and open-ended tasks. On closed-ended benchmarks, it approaches and sometimes exceeds the strongest GT-based skill optimizer without using any GT feedback.

Siran Peng, Cuiyu Yang, Tianyu Fu +9

1MAIS, CASIA · 3Mininglamp Technology · 2SAI, UCAS +2

Large Language Model-Guided Optimization LLM Agent Self-Improvement LLM Agent Skill Learning

Jul 30, 2026cs.AI

Qwen-UI-Agent Technical Report: Toward Next-Generation Real-World Centric Foundation GUI Agents

GUI agents have the potential to become a general purpose executor over existing digital devices. To advance them toward real-world use, we envision agents that operate reliably on real devices, execute workflows across platforms, combine GUI interaction with CLI execution, complete long-horizon tasks, proactively initiate useful services, and autonomously improve their capabilities with minimal human effort. Guided by this vision, we present Qwen-UI-Agent, a real-world centric foundation GUI agent spanning mobile, computer-use, web, and DeepSearch environments. Qwen-UI-Agent combines diverse sandbox environments with a large-scale real-device mobile runtime. Its unified action space interleaves GUI operations with CLI execution and generates batched actions in a single model turn. An AutoResearch-style data flywheel uses agents to construct tasks and environments, diagnose failures, and plan subsequent iterations. Online RL supports training on trajectories exceeding 100 turns, with over 10,000 concurrent environments accelerating rollout. A lightweight harness layer supports proactive service initiation and stateful workflows across mobile and computer. Across a broad suite of evaluations, Qwen-UI-Agent sets state-of-the-art performance on mobile-use benchmarks while delivering competitive performance on computer- and browser-use tasks against frontier models, including Opus 4.8, Gemini 3.1 Pro, and GPT-5.6 Sol. On mobile use, it achieves 82.1% on MobileWorld, 92.2% on MobileWorld-Real, and 97.5% on AndroidDaily. On computer use, it achieves 79.5% on OSWorld-Verified and a 40.0% partial-progress score on OSWorld-v2. On browser use and GUI grounding, it achieves 73.6% on WebArena and 81.5% on ScreenSpot-Pro, respectively.

Hanzhang Zhou, Panrong Tong, Xu Zhang +13

MAI-UI Team Alibaba Token Hub, Alibaba Group

Mobile GUI Automation Computer-Use Agents GUI Agents LLM Agent Self-Improvement Mobile GUI Agents LLM Agent Training+1

Jul 30, 2026cs.AI

VeriSkill: A Self-Evolution Framework for Program Verification Skills

Automating program verification with LLM agents requires generating specifications, annotations, auxiliary lemmas, and tool invocations, all of which depend on reusable skills. A natural remedy is skill self-evolution: distilling skills from trajectories and refining them through feedback. However, existing evolution methods struggle with program verification tasks because they cannot reliably identify skill-specific failures or extract actionable signals from opaque verifier feedback. In this paper, we propose VeriSkill, a self-evolution framework built for program verification. It attributes verification failures to skill deficiencies, distills diagnostic signatures into reusable lessons, and iteratively refines candidate skills, admitting only revisions that improve verification performance while preserving program semantics. Experiments show that VeriSkill consistently outperforms all baselines across multiple verification tools, agent frameworks, and LLM backends.

Changguo Jia, Tianqi Zhao, Zhiyou Xiao +2

Peking University, Beijing, China · Zhongguancun Laboratory, Beijing, China · Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Shanghai, China

LLM Agent Self-Improvement Formal Verification LLM Agent Skill Learning LLM Agent Verification

Jul 29, 2026cs.AI

SkillMentor: LLM Agent Self-Evolution via Learning Blind-Spot Diagnosis

Agent self-evolution has primarily focused on learning how to act, while overlooking an equally important capability: learning to discover what an agent does not know. Existing approaches typically assume that failure discovery is given, focusing on how to repair failures once they are identified. We ask whether blind-spot diagnosis itself can be learned. We thus study diagnosis as an agent capability separate from execution, and exclude two alternative sources of progress: executor adaptation and human supervision. Under these constraints, performance cannot improve through executor updates or annotated examples, forcing all improvements to originate from the learned diagnostic capability. We propose SkillMentor, which trains a Mentor policy via reinforcement learning to generate diagnostic tasks, identify recurrent failure modes, and curate them into reusable corrective skills. Across AppWorld and BFCLv3, SkillMentor improves executor performance by an average of 44.2%. These results suggest that blind-spot diagnosis is a learnable capability, enabling self-evolution without updating executor weights or relying on human-curated data.

Xiaoyi Bao, Yuanzhen Xie, Yunzhi Tan +5

The Hong Kong Polytechnic University · Work done during an internship at Tencent. · Platform and Content Group, Tencent +1

Agent Failure Analysis LLM Agent Self-Improvement LLM Agent Skill Learning RL for LLM Agents

Jul 28, 2026cs.SE

RSIBench-Data: Benchmarking Data-Centric Research for Recursive Self-Improvement

Recursive self-improvement requires turning evidence of model failures into better models. Data-centric post-training research entails diagnosing capability gaps, designing and validating training-data strategies, and learning from checkpoint feedback. Can LLM agents automate this loop? Existing benchmarks entangle research decisions with optimization, serving, evaluation, and systems implementation, obscuring agents' research capability. We introduce RSIBench-Data, a controlled benchmark of LLM agents as data-centric researchers with a fixed post-training stack. Agents iteratively revise training-data strategies for a fixed target model; training and serving use Tinker-backed services, official evaluation runs through Harbor and E2B sandboxes, and budgets are fixed across agents. We evaluate four frontier agents on six benchmarks across software engineering, terminal use, scientific question answering, and mathematics. Agents demonstrate core data-centric research capabilities: in 58.33% of settings, they improve upon the first valid attempt by refining strategies from feedback. However, improvement is inconsistent. Among searches continuing after the best observed score, 78.26% end with a lower-scoring final attempt, while the rest only recover the same peak. A strong candidate may therefore appear early or midway through a run even as later revisions fail. Trajectory analysis identifies four patterns in stronger runs: accurate hypotheses, validation-grounded supervision, behavior-aligned data, and preservation of strong checkpoints. These findings suggest that current agents can make useful data-centric discoveries but cannot yet translate feedback into consistent improvements. RSIBench-Data provides a measurable, auditable testbed for the research capabilities required for recursive self-improvement. We open-source our code at https://github.com/evolvent-ai/RSIBench-Data.

Fanqing Meng, Lingxiao Du, Qiguang Chen +4

1Evolvent AI · 2National University of Singapore

LLM Agent Evaluation LLM Agent Self-Improvement AI Agent Benchmarks LLM Post-Training Recursive Self-Improvement

Jul 27, 2026cs.CL

Self-Authored Verification Is Unreliable in Heuristic Self-Improving Agents

Self-improving agents accumulate capability by repeatedly rewriting procedural policies, controllers, or heuristic rules. They typically rely on self-authored tests or metrics to decide whether to accept subsequent edits. The agent controls both the optimized object and its verifier. As a result, self-assigned scores can remain near perfect while real deployment performance degrades or stays low. We study this problem through the verifier--deployment gap. This gap refers to the discrepancy between an agent's self-authored verification signal and a sealed deployment evaluation that the agent cannot observe or access. We ask how self-authored verification fails under iterative policy-and-test rewriting, how the failure changes with capability, and how little exogenous trust is sufficient to prevent real regressions from being deployed. To address this problem, we introduce a Sealed Exogenous Acceptance Loop (SEAL). SEAL retains self-authored tests but compares each candidate with the incumbent through a fixed harness-side audit. The agent cannot author or inspect the audit, receives only accept/reject, and the whole incumbent state is retained after a clear regression. Our experiments show that this problem often appears in heuristic learning settings. These settings require trial-and-error discovery of the target objective. We further find that failures of self-written verification are stratified by capability. Weaker agents tend to damage previously acquired strategies behind easy self-tests. Stronger agents are more stable, but they still mismeasure the deployment distribution. Standard self-written constraints do not reliably close this gap. In contrast, SEAL outperforms unprotected baselines across six models and three random seeds. Reliable self-improvement need not abandon self-verification, but it requires at least one deployment-acceptance signal outside the agent's control.

Diandian Guo, Cong Cao, Fangfang Yuan +3

Institute of Information Engineering, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China · School of Cyber Security, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China

AI Agent Evaluation LLM Agent Self-Improvement LLM Agent Verification Self-Improving Agents

Jul 25, 2026cs.AI

AgentOmnia: Scaling Agentic Models for Full-Scenario Applications

Large language model agents have advanced rapidly, yet progress remains fragmented across domains, capabilities, task difficulty, and interaction settings. We frame this as full-scenario agentic scaling and present AgentOmnia, a framework coordinating task-space definition, data synthesis, post-training, evaluation, and improvement across To-Consumer (ToC), To-Business (ToB), and To-Employee (ToE) applications. An extensible Domain x Capability x Atomic Difficulty taxonomy aligns these stages and enables fine-grained diagnosis with OmniaBench. AgentOmnia combines bidirectional environment-task synthesis with tool-dependency, program-structured, and solver-based pipelines, constructing 5,018 stateful environments with 255,375 tools and 52,361 tasks. Programs, solvers, and verifiers provide correctness signals, while supervised fine-tuning, online agentic reinforcement learning, and a rollback curriculum support post-training. Evaluation failures translate into Product Requirement Documents (PRDs) for targeted self-evolution. Starting from Qwen3-30B-A3B-Thinking-2507, AgentOmnia raises the pass rate on the OmniaBench challenging subset from 9.16% to 37.11% and the macro-average across OmniaBench,

τ^2

-Bench, DeepPlanning, and VitaBench from 22.86% to 41.69%. Under a unified protocol,it leads the evaluated agentic post-trained baselines on OmniaBench and retains the highest four-benchmark macro-average. It also surpasses Qwen3-235B-A22B-Thinking-2507 on all four benchmarks and exceeds Qwen3.5-35B-A3B on the macro-average. Gains span three application splits, ten capability dimensions, eight atomic-difficulty factors, and 76 of 90 level-1 domains, indicating broad rather than category-specific improvement. A one-round study provides initial evidence for PRD-guided self-evolution, motivating validation at larger scales and in industrial settings.

Hao Jiang, Gangtao Xin, Yingdi Huang +35

Huawei Cloud Post-Training Team

Tool-Augmented Language Model Agents Agentic RL LLM Agent Self-Improvement AI Agent Benchmarks LLM Agent Training

Jul 22, 2026cs.CL

From Agent Failures to Text Policies: What Works and What Breaks

TextGrad improves language-model systems by revising text from feedback. Its core thesis is that natural-language feedback can act as a gradient for optimizing text components without changing model weights. Applying it to agents is harder because feedback arrives only after a sequence of actions, making it difficult to identify which decision caused failure. We study this problem by separating the ability to follow a useful policy from the ability to learn that policy from experience. Our main finding is a clear gap between these two abilities. Human-written policies improve two frozen 7B agents on TextWorldExpress by 5.0 success points, showing that useful policy text exists. However, policies generated from agent trajectories do not reliably outperform fixed prompting, even with richer traces, counterfactual evidence, or iterative GEPA search. The main challenge for agent-level TextGrad is therefore not executing textual policy updates, but reliably generating and selecting them from experience.

Jaideep Ray, Ankit Goyal

Independent Researcher

Policy Optimization LLM Agent Self-Improvement LLM Agents LLM Agent Training

Jul 21, 2026cs.CL

Verifiable Self-Evolution for Open-Ended Dialogue Skills via Future-Feedback Prediction

Textual skills provide a lightweight way to improve frozen language-model agents, but their self-evolution normally requires a stable validation signal. Such signals are natural in mathematics or code, where an answer can be checked after it changes, yet are problematic in open-ended dialogue: changing the assistant response also changes the user's next reaction, so a logged reaction cannot directly evaluate a counterfactual response. We propose future-feedback skill evolution, which first redirects self-evolution from prescribing the current answer to predicting whether the observed answer will lead to a positive or negative subsequent user signal. This prediction task is verifiable on fixed logged tuples and therefore supports validation-gated textual optimization. The evolved feedback skill captures interpretable criteria for response quality and can subsequently serve as a diagnostic and optimization target for answer skills. On a proprietary, privacy-preserving sales-assistant dataset, careful quality filtering and a balanced resolved/unresolved split yield more than 75% prediction accuracy. Beyond this result, the central contribution is a formulation that converts otherwise moving conversational feedback into a fixed offline learning target, enabling reproducible skill evolution without placing every candidate skill in live traffic. We discuss the boundary between observational verification and counterfactual validity, and position the method as an offline optimization stage rather than a replacement for final human or online evaluation.

ChaoJin Zhao, Xuan Jiang

ByteDance

LLM Agent Self-Improvement LLM Agent Skill Learning Multi-Turn Dialogue Evaluation

Jul 19, 2026cs.AI

Self-Modifying Lean Proof Agents with Verifier-Grounded Benchmark Coevolution

Designing effective Lean proof agents is a central challenge in formal mathematical reasoning. Beyond building stronger provers, recent work emphasizes the workflow around Lean: how an agent decomposes proof obligations, uses tools and compiler feedback, diagnoses failures, repairs proofs, and maintains structured proof context. Motivated by code-level self-evolving agents, we study whether such workflows can be evolved rather than hand-designed. We present a self-evolving Lean proof agent in which a small fixed, trusted runtime wraps a fully mutable workspace: the proof workflow, prompts, and tools. Unlike most self-evolving systems, which optimize against a fixed external benchmark, our system coevolves the agent and its benchmark. Between generations, the highest-scoring agent (the champion) revises the active task distribution through a mastery-throttled curriculum update that introduces harder proof obligations only after the current level is mastered, and a single-anchor recalibration re-runs the champion on the updated benchmark to keep scores comparable as difficulty rises. All evolution stays inside a Lean-grounded verification loop: however the agent rewrites itself, a success counts only when its behavior yields Lean-verified proofs under a trusted snapshot, and each attempt must emit a machine-readable, Lean-grounded proof context whose representation may evolve but whose groundedness is enforced. We run the coevolving trajectory and a fixed-benchmark baseline for 15 active generations and compare them on a held-out miniF2F test split. The best coevolving agent reaches a 45.1% held-out solve rate, versus 12.7% for the seed and 32.0% for the best fixed-benchmark agent, showing that verifier-grounded self-evolution can improve Lean proof workflows under a coevolving benchmark.

Yuqing Li, Zeguan Wu, Yu Gan +1

University of Pittsburgh

LLM Agent Self-Improvement Lean Theorem Proving Self-Evolving Agents

Jul 18, 2026cs.AI

AgentBrew: Lifelong Knowledge Brewing from Strong Teachers to Weak LLM Agents

Deploying LLM agents typically requires a compact test-time student, even if a stronger teacher is available during training. We study knowledge brewing: distilling a teacher's interactive experience into a persistent external memory for the student. Crucially, this requires no weight updates, expert demonstrations, ground-truth labels, or test-time teacher access. This setting poses two challenges: environments provide only sparse, binary feedback, and teacher-authored notes must be inherently tailored to be concretely executable by a substantially weaker student. To address these hurdles, we propose AgentBrew, comprising two coupled components. First, a failure-triggered teacher--Ralph Loop mitigates sparse feedback by transforming student failures into environment-validated notes. Second, student-aware synthesis calibrates teacher knowledge to the weak executor's operational granularity, yielding model-specific, actionable guidance. Extensive evaluations and comprehensive ablations across coding, math, and tool-use tasks demonstrate that this asymmetric, training-free brewing paradigm produces highly capable yet deployable LLM agents.

Yangqin Jiang, Chao Huang

The University of Hong Kong

LLM Agent Self-Improvement LLM Agent Skill Learning Knowledge Distillation Memory-Augmented Language Model Agents

Jul 17, 2026cs.LG

Recursive Harness Self-Improvement

Under model--harness co-evolution, harnesses are not merely inference-time scaffolds but data-generating components whose execution traces can shape future foundation models. This motivates harness-in-the-loop learning: optimizing harnesses for both immediate agent performance and the quality of traces used for future model training. However, continually updating provider-built scaffolds is costly and labor-intensive. We therefore investigate whether optimizing user-constructed harnesses in a task-specific manner can improve execution-trace quality while remaining computationally lightweight and requiring only a few update iterations. To this end, we introduce Recursive Harness Self-Improvement (RHI), which represents the harness as a prompt-level specification of the agent loop and iteratively refines it using pairwise feedback over its own revision history. Across 30 synthetic machine-learning research tasks spanning quantitative finance, robotics, and pharmacy, a few RHI iterations suffice to substantially raise the performance ceiling of low-reasoning-effort agents, exceeding the corresponding maximum-reasoning-effort setting while reducing inference cost by up to 60%. We show that these gains arise primarily from improved task-specific context management through more effective inter-agent information flow rather than longer reasoning traces. Finally, we formalize this behavior as an information-theoretic hypothesis for RHI's implicit optimization objective, suggesting RHI as a practical algorithm for continual learning within the paradigm of model--harness co-evolution.

Hyunin Lee, Jinglue Xu, Jeffrey Seely +3

1Sakana AI, 2UC Berkeley

Continual Learning for LLM Agents Agent Harness Optimization LLM Agent Self-Improvement Prompt Optimization LLM Agent Harnesses

Jul 15, 2026cs.AI

Reward-Free Evolving Agents via Pairwise Validator

A self-evolving agentic loop repeatedly proposes a tweaked version of an agent (its prompt template or program) and accepts or rejects the change based on a per-iteration quality signal. Designing that signal is often the costly part of the project: a reliable scalar reward requires domain expertise and labeled examples that are themselves as expensive to assemble as the agent's underlying task. We propose replacing the scalar at the accept/reject gate with a pairwise validator: a frozen LLM that, given the parent and child candidate, returns a binary verdict on which is better. Pairwise judgment is generally easier and more stable than absolute scoring, due to its contrastive nature, which mitigates the need for strict scale calibration. The validator also requires no training of its own. We integrate the validator into three published self-evolving engines (GEPA, ADRS, ShinkaEvolve) and report two flavors: Adaptive Focus, which retains the engine's existing val-set parent selection, and Soft Elo, which lets the validator's verdicts drive parent selection so that val-set rewards drop as well. Across multiple agents and two artifact substrates (prompt and code), our method matches or exceeds the full-reward baseline on the majority of settings we evaluate, and the pattern survives a cross-family validator swap. The pairwise gate is thus a drop-in replacement for per-step reward design at competitive task accuracy without the labeling cost.

Minghao Liu, Yu Wang, Jiayun Wang +1

Accenture

Pairwise Preference Evaluation LLM Agent Self-Improvement Self-Evolving Agents