Self-Evolving Agents

Large Language Model (LLM) agents are reshaping the industrial landscape. However, most practical agents still rely on human-designed scaffolds, making their creation and adaptation across diverse domains labor-intensive. This situation poses a central question: can we automatically create and evolve domain agents through interaction experience in real-world environments? While recent approaches have sought to automate agent creation, several treat scaffold optimization as a black-box procedure guided primarily by final performance metrics. Such strategies overlook critical evidence explaining why an agent succeeds or fails and often incur high computational costs. To address these limitations, we propose ReCreate, an experience-driven framework for creating and evolving specialized domain agents. ReCreate systematically leverages agent interaction histories to identify the causes of success and failure and guide targeted scaffold updates. Specifically, we introduce an agent-as-optimizer paradigm in which an optimizer agent actively inspects execution experience and iteratively refines the task agent's scaffold through three key components: (i) an experience storage and retrieval mechanism for on-demand evidence inspection; (ii) a reasoning-creating synergy pipeline that translates execution evidence into updates to prompts, workflows, tools, and memory; and (iii) hierarchical updates that consolidate instance-level refinements into reusable domain-level improvements. Experiments across thirteen evaluation settings spanning four domains show that ReCreate consistently outperforms human-designed agents and existing automated agent generation and self-evolving baselines, even when evolving from minimal seed scaffolds.

Self-evolving agents powered by Large Language Models (LLMs) have emerged as a promising direction across diverse domains, including code optimization and scientific discovery, yet their core failure modes remain underexplored. Through a comprehensive empirical study, we identify that the model's reasoning becomes anchored to the local context of current hypotheses, overemphasizing low-level details while neglecting the broader search landscape. As a result, such agents become prone to context pollution and mode collapse, repeatedly revisiting flawed hypotheses and converging on suboptimal solutions. To address this challenge, we propose Progress-Aware Consistent Evolution (PACEvolve), a systematic framework for governing agent memory and search dynamics. PACEvolve overcomes these limitations through three key techniques: (1) Hierarchical Context Management (HCM), which structures historical trajectories while dynamically pruning branches to preserve a high-signal memory state; (2) Momentum-Based Backtracking (MBB), which monitors optimization progress to escape local minima; and (3) a self-adaptive Collaborative Evolution policy (CE) that balances intra-trajectory refinement with inter-trajectory knowledge transfer. By decoupling high-level idea generation from low-level code evaluation, PACEvolve maintains a global view of search momentum and achieves state-of-the-art results across complex evolutionary benchmarks.

Strategic replicators combine evaluated choice and reproductive transmission. An agent chooses among alternatives; the consequences of those choices influence continuation or reproduction; and successors receive organization that shapes later choices. Artificial intelligence makes this combination salient when agents have authority to create, configure, or retire software instances. This paper organizes the general logic around three principles: situated choice, reproductive transmission, and institution-mediated coupling. The principles are constitutive rather than predictions of growth or improvement. A common representation distinguishes carriers, inherited records, decision owners, and the mechanisms that allocate consequences. Actual parent-descendant attribution yields a selection-transmission identity. Separate compatibility results characterize when utility-maximizing choices also maximize a reproductive criterion. Gode and Sunder's zero-intelligence traders reveal the role of institutions: enforced properties can hold across different decision procedures, while aggregate efficiency alone determines neither individual gains nor descent. A worked market-rent-entry model connects institutional profits to actual offspring, with its occurrence-level ancestry bridge checked in Lean. A direct-deployment example then shows evaluated preferences undergoing selection without presupposing that every chooser values reproduction. Formal appendices develop games with endogenous players, deployment-induced tipping, endogenous electorates, and the production of institutions, with models, proofs, and examples. The paper and its supporting formal artifacts are a prototype kernel with a generative function: an instrument for constructing models of strategic replication. The results are formal; their application to deployed populations and their empirical implications remain to be tested.

Self-evolving agents improve their performance on long-horizon tasks by learning from their own interactions with an environment. A common approach uses the resulting failed trajectories as negatives for preference training. However, collecting an agent's own failures does not ensure that they provide informative supervision for further improvement. Obvious failures may be easy to reject without learning to identify errors in more plausible attempts. These plausible but incorrect trajectories can serve as hard negatives, helping agents learn to distinguish successful behavior from failures with less obvious errors. To enable agents to generate and learn from such informative negatives, we propose a co-evolving framework that couples a target agent's self-improvement with a failure agent trained to generate hard negatives. The failure agent learns exclusively from both agents' failed trajectories to generate higher-reward failures, which the target agent uses as negatives for preference training. As the target policy improves, its failures provide new training data for the failure agent. The updated failure agent, in turn, provides new negatives for target training, allowing negative generation to adapt alongside the target policy. Across online shopping, scientific reasoning, and interactive SQL querying, our framework improves average task reward by 5.7 over the baseline. These results demonstrate the value of learning to generate and use informative failures for agent self-improvement. We will make our code publicly available.

Large Language Model (LLM) Agents, often trained with Reinforcement Learning (RL), are constrained by a dependency on human-curated data, limiting scalability and tethering AI to human knowledge. Existing self-evolution frameworks offer an alternative but are typically restricted by the model's inherent capabilities and single-round interactions, hindering the development of complex curricula involving tool use or dynamic reasoning. We introduce Agent0, a fully autonomous framework that evolves high-performing agents without external data through multi-step co-evolution and seamless tool integration. Agent0 establishes a symbiotic competition between two agents initialized from the same base LLM: a curriculum agent that proposes increasingly challenging frontier tasks, and an executor agent that learns to solve them. We integrate external tools to enhance the executor's problem-solving capacity; this improvement, in turn, pressures the curriculum agent to construct more complex, tool-aware tasks. Through this iterative process, Agent0 establishes a self-reinforcing cycle that continuously produces high-quality curricula. Empirically, Agent0 substantially boosts reasoning capabilities, improving the Qwen3-8B-Base model by 18% on mathematical reasoning and 24% on general reasoning benchmarks. Code is available at https://github.com/aiming-lab/Agent0.

Agents in a society can reuse each other's experience, but indiscriminate memory use increases processing cost and can reduce task success. We present SEDM (Selective Self-Evolving Distributed Memory), a framework that selects both what agents share and when recipients use it. On the sender side, SEDM admits memories through paired execution tests, ranks them by relevance and measured utility, and abstracts them for cross-domain reuse. On the recipient side, Calibrated Memory Gating (CMG) predicts success with and without memory in a single forward pass, learning from paired outcomes including ties. It injects memory only when the calibrated success gain outweighs a context-cost penalty. SEDM exceeds the strongest evaluated baseline on LoCoMo open-domain questions by 15.1 F1 points and outperforms G-Memory on FEVER and HotpotQA with 16-32% fewer prompt tokens. In a controlled HotpotQA study, CMG achieves success comparable to always using memory with 18% fewer agent input tokens. Within the full SEDM pipeline on LoCoMo, CMG outperforms both always-use and no-memory policies for two SEDM memories while using 19-31% fewer input tokens than always-use. These results show that selective use can recover value from shared memories that hurt performance when injected indiscriminately.

Current large language models (LLMs) are constrained by human-derived training data and limited by a single level of abstraction that impedes definitive truth judgments. This paper introduces a novel framework in which AI models autonomously generate and validate new knowledge through direct interaction with their environment. Central to this approach is an unbounded, ungamable numeric reward - such as annexed disk space or follower count - that guides learning without requiring human benchmarks. AI agents iteratively generate strategies and executable code to maximize this metric, with successful outcomes forming the basis for self-retraining and incremental generalisation. To mitigate model collapse and the warm start problem, the framework emphasizes empirical validation over textual similarity and supports fine-tuning via GRPO. The system architecture employs modular agents for environment analysis, strategy generation, and code synthesis, enabling scalable experimentation. This work outlines a pathway toward self-improving AI systems capable of advancing beyond human-imposed constraints toward autonomous general intelligence.