Overview

Self-improving agents study how systems can learn from their own actions and outcomes to perform better on later tasks, from coding and web use to robotics and long-horizon games. Common approaches turn successes and failures into reusable memories or executable skills, revise prompts and agent harnesses, or update model parameters through fine-tuning and reinforcement learning. Work increasingly uses repeated trials, held-out tasks, execution-based checks, and external evaluators to test whether improvements transfer rather than merely exploit a score. The central tension is that feedback and self-authored tests can be unreliable, so genuine progress must be balanced against regression, reward hacking, safety risks, and the cost of verification.

Latest papers

CardsList

171 papers57 papers in the last four weeks, up 171% on the four weeks before. 0.3% of all new papers.

  1. Predict Before You Modify: Learning Improvement Dynamics for Self-Evolving Agents

    Sep 26, 2026Zixuan Xie, Chang Xu, Yuhua Jiang +1LLM Agent Self-ImprovementSelf-Improving Agents

  2. When Better Gets Worse: Improvement Fidelity for Self-Improving Agents in Adaptive Worlds

    Sep 26, 2026Ke Wang, Zijie Zhao, Zhiyi Yuan +1Self-Improving AgentsAI Agent Evaluation

  3. GameBoyWorlds: A Testbed for Self-Improvement in Embodied Video Games

    Sep 25, 2026Dhananjay Ashok, Adam Shen, Aslan Huo Feng +10Self-Improving AgentsGame-Playing Agents

  4. Memory as Middleware for Self-Improving AI Agents

    Sep 25, 2026K. R. Jayaram, Vatche Isahagian, Vinod Muthusamy +4Agent Memory ManagementSelf-Improving Agents

  5. LensDesigner: A Self-Improving Agent for Optical Lens Design

    Sep 24, 2026Lei Sun, Haoran Liang, Dannong Xu +6Self-Improving AgentsAutomated Heuristic Design

  6. MedRSI: Recursive Self-Improvement for Medical Agents via Clinically Aligned Self-Evolution

    Sep 21, 2026Junde Wu, Jiayuan Zhu, Minghao Hu +2Self-Improving AgentsSelf-Evolving Agents

  7. Reflections on Trusting Trust, Revisited: Contaminating Self-Modifying AI Coding Agents with Poisoned Benchmarks

    Sep 15, 2026Franziska Roesner, Tadayoshi KohnoAI Coding AgentsAI Agent Security

  8. Dream-RSI: Recursive Self-Improvement through Evolving Worlds

    Sep 14, 2026Tong Zheng, Xidong Wu, Zheng Zhang +14RL ExplorationSelf-Improving Agents

  9. The Last AI Built by Humans: Toward Genuine Recursive Self-Improvement

    Sep 10, 2026Yi Duan, Ying Liu, Zirui Tang +32Self-Improving AgentsLanguage Model Self-Improvement

  10. A Theory of Reliable Self-Evolution for Agent Harnesses

    Sep 8, 2026Qianshu Cai, Yonggang Zhang, Jun Nie +6Agent Harness OptimizationSelf-Improving Agents

  11. Harness-of-Harness: Multi-Day Autonomous Software Development with Continual Improvement

    Sep 1, 2026Haoyang Yan, Min-le Su, Hangfan Zhang +6Agent Harness OptimizationSelf-Improving Agents

  12. Recursive Criticality of AI Self-Improvement

    Aug 31, 2026Mikhail BurtsevSelf-Improving AgentsRecursive Self-Improvement

  13. SCAFFOLD: Self-Improving Web Agents via Recursive Parametric Skill Abstraction

    Aug 31, 2026Bowei He, Xiaokun Zhang, Meng Ding +1Web AgentsLLM Agent Skill Learning

  14. Auditing Harness Tampering in Self-Improving Agents

    Aug 30, 2026Xing Wang, Xiaoyi Zhang, Jie ShaoAI Agent AuditingSelf-Improving Agents

  15. Self-Aware Active Learning Enables Continual Improvement in Autonomous Driving

    Aug 30, 2026Dong Hu, Chao Huang, Carman K. M. Lee +1Active LearningAutonomous Driving

  16. CineForge: Self-Improving Agents for Long-Horizon Video Generation

    Aug 30, 2026Junxiang Liu, Lin Wang, Haiyu Shi +10Long-Horizon Video GenerationAgentic Video Generation

  17. Recursive Experiential-Working Memory Evolution for Long-Horizon Agent Harnesses

    Aug 25, 2026Zhaochen Yu, Yingcheng Wu, Zhenfei Yin +5Long-Horizon LLM AgentsMemory-Augmented Agents

  18. CAFE: Self-Improving Search Agents Need Co-Evolving Feedback

    Aug 25, 2026Boyang Liu, Senjie Jin, Peixin Wang +17Agentic SearchSelf-Improving Agents

  19. Metan^n: Recursive Self-Improvement through Emergent Depth

    Aug 25, 2026Zae Myung Kim, Young-Jun Lee, Seungyeon Jwa +1LLM Agent Self-ImprovementSelf-Improving Agents