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. From 0-to-1 to 1-to-N: Reproducible Engineering Evidence for MetaAI Recursive Self-Design

    Jun 8, 2026Dun Li, Jiatao Li, Hongzhi LiLLM Agent Self-ImprovementSelf-Improving Agents

  2. From Failed Trajectories to Reliable LLM Agents: Diagnosing and Repairing Harness Flaws

    Jun 4, 2026Mengzhuo Chen, Junjie Wang, Zhe Liu +3Agent Failure AnalysisSelf-Improving Agents

  3. The Meta-Agent Challenge: Are Current Agents Capable of Autonomous Agent Development?

    Jun 3, 2026Xinyu Lu, Tianshu Wang, Pengbo Wang +8AI Agent BenchmarksSelf-Improving Agents

  4. Agentic Safety is an Epistemic Property, Not a Behavioral One

    Jun 2, 2026Charles L. Wang, Keir Dorchen, Peter JinAI AlignmentAI Agent Safety

  5. EvoDrive: Pareto Evolution for Safety-Critical Autonomous Driving via Self-Improving LLM Agents

    Jun 2, 2026Tong Nie, Yuewen Mei, Yihong Tang +4Multi-Objective Evolutionary OptimizationAutonomous Driving Safety Evaluation

  6. SAGE: A Quantitative Evaluation of Socialized Evolution in Agent Ecosystems

    Jun 2, 2026Linyue Pan, Yaoming Zhu, Lin Qiu +2Multi-Agent CollaborationAI Agent Benchmarks

  7. MMG2Skill: Can Agents Distill In-the-Wild Guides into Self-Evolving Skills?

    Jun 1, 2026Xinyu Che, Junqi Xiong, Yunfei Ge +10Continual Learning for LLM AgentsLLM Agent Skill Learning

  8. SEAL: Synergistic Co-Evolution of Agents and Learning Environments

    May 23, 2026Yihao Hu, Zhihao Wen, Xiujin Liu +3LLM Agent TrainingSelf-Improving Agents

  9. Training Language Agents to Learn from Experience

    May 19, 2026Yuval Shalev, Zifeng Ding, Mateja JamnikContinual Learning for LLM AgentsSelf-Improving Agents

  10. AutoResearchClaw: Self-Reinforcing Autonomous Research with Human-AI Collaboration

    May 19, 2026Jiaqi Liu, Shi Qiu, Mairui Li +33Human-in-the-Loop AIAutonomous Scientific Discovery

  11. SE-GA: Memory-Augmented Self-Evolution for GUI Agents

    May 16, 2026Shilong Jin, Lanjun Wang, Zhuosheng ZhangGUI AgentsMobile GUI Agents

  12. ASH: Agents that Self-Hone in Long-Horizon Worlds

    May 14, 2026Benjamin Schneider, Xavier Schneider, Victor Zhong +1Game-Playing AgentsSelf-Improving Agents

  13. Harnessing Agentic Evolution

    May 13, 2026Jiayi Zhang, Yongfeng Gu, Jianhao Ruan +10Evolutionary OptimizationSelf-Improving Agents

  14. R^2-Mem: Reflective Experience for Memory Search

    May 13, 2026Xinyuan Wang, Wenyu Mao, Junkang Wu +2Inference-Time SearchLLM Agent Memory

  15. GRAFT-ATHENA: Self-Improving Agentic Teams for Autonomous Discovery and Evolutionary Numerical Algorithms

    May 11, 2026Juan Diego Toscano, Zhaojie Chai, George Em KarniadakisAI Agents for Scientific DiscoveryAutomated Algorithm Discovery

  16. The Agent Use of Agent Beings: Agent Cybernetics Is the Missing Science of Foundation Agents

    May 11, 2026Xinrun Wang, Chang Yang, He Zhao +2Self-Improving AgentsLong-Horizon LLM Agents

  17. Continual Harness: Online Adaptation for Self-Improving Foundation Agents

    May 11, 2026Seth Karten, Joel Zhang, Tersoo Upaa +5Continual Learning for LLM AgentsGame-Playing Agents

  18. Auto Research with Specialist Agents Develops Effective and Non-Trivial Training Recipes

    May 7, 2026Jingjie Ning, Xiaochuan Li, Ji Zeng +2Multi-Agent SystemsSelf-Improving Agents

  19. DreamProver: Evolving Transferable Lemma Libraries via a Wake-Sleep Theorem-Proving Agent

    Apr 29, 2026Youyuan Zhang, Jialiang Sun, Hangrui Bi +4Automated Theorem ProvingProgram Synthesis

  20. Escher-Loop: Mutual Evolution by Closed-Loop Self-Referential Optimization

    Apr 25, 2026Ziyang Liu, Xinyan Guo, Xuchen Wei +2Evolutionary OptimizationSelf-Improving Agents

  21. From Skills to Talent: Organising Heterogeneous Agents as a Real-World Company

    Apr 24, 2026Zhengxu Yu, Yu Fu, Zhiyuan He +5Multi-Agent OrchestrationMulti-Agent Systems

  22. Nemobot Games: Crafting Strategic AI Gaming Agents for Interactive Learning with Large Language Models

    Apr 23, 2026Chee Wei Tan, Yuchen Wang, Shangxin GuoGame-Playing AgentsLLM Agents

  23. CreativeGame:Toward Mechanic-Aware Creative Game Generation

    Apr 21, 2026Hongnan Ma, Han Wang, Shenglin Wang +6Execution-Guided Code GenerationComputational Creativity

  24. The Essence of Balance for Self-Improving Agents in Vision-and-Language Navigation

    Apr 21, 2026Zhen Liu, Yuhan Liu, Jinjun Wang +3Vision-Language NavigationSelf-Improving Agents

  25. Towards Self-Improving Error Diagnosis in Multi-Agent Systems

    Apr 19, 2026Jiazheng Li, Emine Yilmaz, Bei Chen +1Multi-Agent LLM SystemsMulti-Agent Systems

  26. AdaExplore: Failure-Driven Adaptation and Diversity-Preserving Search for Efficient Kernel Generation

    Apr 17, 2026Weihua Du, Jingming Zhuo, Yixin Dong +9Test-Time AdaptationGPU Kernel Optimization

  27. EE-MCP: Self-Evolving MCP-GUI Agents via Automated Environment Generation and Experience Learning

    Apr 10, 2026Tiantian He, Yihang Chen, Keyue Jiang +4Computer-Use AgentsSelf-Improving Agents