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Jun 17

M$^\star$: Every Task Deserves Its Own Memory Harness

Large language model agents rely on specialized memory systems to accumulate and reuse knowledge during extended interactions. Recent architectures typically adopt a fixed memory design tailored to specific domains, such as semantic retrieval for conversations or skills reused for coding. However, a memory system optimized for one purpose frequently fails to transfer to others. To address this limitation, we introduce M^star, a method that automatically discovers task-optimized memory harnesses through executable program evolution. Specifically, M^star models an agent memory system as a memory program written in Python. This program encapsulates the data Schema, the storage Logic, and the agent workflow Instructions. We optimize these components jointly using a reflective code evolution method; this approach employs a population-based search strategy and analyzes evaluation failures to iteratively refine the candidate programs. We evaluate M^star on four distinct benchmarks spanning conversation, embodied planning, and expert reasoning. Our results demonstrate that M^star improves performance over existing fixed-memory baselines robustly across all evaluated tasks. Furthermore, the evolved memory programs exhibit structurally distinct processing mechanisms for each domain. This finding indicates that specializing the memory mechanism for a given task explores a broad design space and provides a superior solution compared to general-purpose memory paradigms.

  • 7 authors
·
Apr 9

EvoLattice: Persistent Internal-Population Evolution through Multi-Alternative Quality-Diversity Graph Representations for LLM-Guided Program Discovery

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used to evolve programs and multi-agent systems, yet most existing approaches rely on overwrite-based mutations that maintain only a single candidate at a time. Such methods discard useful variants, suffer from destructive edits, and explore a brittle search space prone to structural failure. We introduce EvoLattice, a framework that represents an entire population of candidate programs or agent behaviors within a single directed acyclic graph. Each node stores multiple persistent alternatives, and every valid path through the graph defines a distinct executable candidate, yielding a large combinatorial search space without duplicating structure. EvoLattice enables fine-grained alternative-level evaluation by scoring each alternative across all paths in which it appears, producing statistics that reveal how local design choices affect global performance. These statistics provide a dense, data-driven feedback signal for LLM-guided mutation, recombination, and pruning, while preserving successful components. Structural correctness is guaranteed by a deterministic self-repair mechanism that enforces acyclicity and dependency consistency independently of the LLM. EvoLattice naturally extends to agent evolution by interpreting alternatives as prompt fragments or sub-agent behaviors. Across program synthesis (proxy and optimizer meta-learning), EvoLattice yields more stable evolution, greater expressivity, and stronger improvement trajectories than prior LLM-guided methods. The resulting dynamics resemble quality-diversity optimization, emerging implicitly from EvoLattice's internal multi-alternative representation rather than an explicit external archive.

  • 1 authors
·
Dec 16, 2025

Kernel-Smith: A Unified Recipe for Evolutionary Kernel Optimization

We present Kernel-Smith, a framework for high-performance GPU kernel and operator generation that combines a stable evaluation-driven evolutionary agent with an evolution-oriented post-training recipe. On the agent side, Kernel-Smith maintains a population of executable candidates and iteratively improves them using an archive of top-performing and diverse programs together with structured execution feedback on compilation, correctness, and speedup. To make this search reliable, we build backend-specific evaluation services for Triton on NVIDIA GPUs and Maca on MetaX GPUs. On the training side, we convert long-horizon evolution trajectories into step-centric supervision and reinforcement learning signals by retaining correctness-preserving, high-gain revisions, so that the model is optimized as a strong local improver inside the evolutionary loop rather than as a one-shot generator. Under a unified evolutionary protocol, Kernel-Smith-235B-RL achieves state-of-the-art overall performance on KernelBench with Nvidia Triton backend, attaining the best average speedup ratio and outperforming frontier proprietary models including Gemini-3.0-pro and Claude-4.6-opus. We further validate the framework on the MetaX MACA backend, where our Kernel-Smith-MACA-30B surpasses large-scale counterparts such as DeepSeek-V3.2-think and Qwen3-235B-2507-think, highlighting potential for seamless adaptation across heterogeneous platforms. Beyond benchmark results, the same workflow produces upstream contributions to production systems including SGLang and LMDeploy, demonstrating that LLM-driven kernel optimization can transfer from controlled evaluation to practical deployment.

Governed Evolution of Agent Runtimes through Executable Operational Cognition

Recent advances in agentic systems increasingly treat code as an executable operational substrate rather than as a disposable output artifact. Prior work such as Code as Agent Harness frames validated agent-generated artifacts as runtime entities that can be created, executed, revised, persisted, and reused within long-running cognitive loops. However, the governance, lifecycle management, and operational evolution of such artifacts remain under-specified. This paper proposes a framework for governed runtime evolution in multi-agent systems through executable operational cognition. We formalize agent-generated artifacts as persistent runtime capabilities that progressively become part of the operational substrate rather than transient intermediate outputs. Building on this perspective, we introduce HarnessMutation as a governed mechanism for lifecycle-aware runtime adaptation operating under explicit validation, traceability, evaluation, and rollback constraints. Rather than treating runtime adaptation as unrestricted self-modification, the proposed framework models evolution as a bounded and observable process over persistent operational memory. It further shows how these ideas can be operationalized over modern agent runtimes and governance-oriented orchestration systems, providing a conceptual foundation for adaptive infrastructures whose evolution remains explicit, auditable, and constrained.

  • 1 authors
·
May 25

Yunjue Agent Tech Report: A Fully Reproducible, Zero-Start In-Situ Self-Evolving Agent System for Open-Ended Tasks

Conventional agent systems often struggle in open-ended environments where task distributions continuously drift and external supervision is scarce. Their reliance on static toolsets or offline training lags behind these dynamics, leaving the system's capability boundaries rigid and unknown. To address this, we propose the In-Situ Self-Evolving paradigm. This approach treats sequential task interactions as a continuous stream of experience, enabling the system to distill short-term execution feedback into long-term, reusable capabilities without access to ground-truth labels. Within this framework, we identify tool evolution as the critical pathway for capability expansion, which provides verifiable, binary feedback signals. Within this framework, we develop Yunjue Agent, a system that iteratively synthesizes, optimizes, and reuses tools to navigate emerging challenges. To optimize evolutionary efficiency, we further introduce a Parallel Batch Evolution strategy. Empirical evaluations across five diverse benchmarks under a zero-start setting demonstrate significant performance gains over proprietary baselines. Additionally, complementary warm-start evaluations confirm that the accumulated general knowledge can be seamlessly transferred to novel domains. Finally, we propose a novel metric to monitor evolution convergence, serving as a function analogous to training loss in conventional optimization. We open-source our codebase, system traces, and evolved tools to facilitate future research in resilient, self-evolving intelligence.

Your Code Agent Can Grow Alongside You with Structured Memory

While "Intent-oriented programming" (or "Vibe Coding") redefines software engineering, existing code agents remain tethered to static code snapshots. Consequently, they struggle to model the critical information embedded in the temporal evolution of projects, failing to leverage the "reasoning trajectories" implicit in past successful practices. This limitation results in rigid behavioral logic and a lack of autonomous adaptability, ultimately hindering their ability to tackle complex, repository-level problems. To bridge this static-dynamic mismatch, we propose MemCoder, a framework designed to enable continual human-AI co-evolution. MemCoder first structures historical human experience to distill latent intent-to-code mappings from past commits. It then employs a self-refinement mechanism driven by verification feedback to correct agent behavior in real-time. Crucially, an experience self-internalization mechanism is introduced to crystallize human-validated solutions into long-term knowledge, thereby supporting sustained evolution. Experimental results on SWE-bench Verified demonstrate that MemCoder not only achieves State-of-the-Art (SOTA) performance but also delivers a 9.4% improvement in resolved rate over the general foundation model DeepSeek-V3.2. These findings indicate that equipping agents with the capability to co-evolve with humans via project history and real-time feedback effectively unlocks the potential of general models in complex software engineering tasks.

  • 5 authors
·
Feb 25

BenchEvolver: Frontier Task Synthesis via Solution-Centric Evolution

The rapid progress of frontier large language models has led to widespread benchmark saturation, limiting the ability of existing datasets to differentiate model capabilities or provide useful training signal. For instance, on LiveCodeBench, frontier models achieve over 99% Pass@1 on easy splits and exceed 90% Pass@1 on average across difficulty levels. Constructing new, challenging datasets typically requires substantial human effort, creating a bottleneck for progress. We introduce BenchEvolver, a solution-centric evolutionary framework that automatically transforms existing coding problems into harder variants. Rather than generating problems from scratch, BenchEvolver evolves reference solutions through structured transformations and derives corresponding statements and tests from the evolved solutions. This design grounds generation in executable semantics, enabling scalable construction of high-quality, diverse, and difficult tasks with verifiable correctness. Applying BenchEvolver to LiveCodeBench and SciCode, we obtain evolved tasks that are substantially harder while maintaining validity, reference correctness, and diversity. We further curate LiveCodeBench-Plus, a 91-problem benchmark combining evolved and difficult original LCB-v6 tasks, where frontier-model Pass@1 ranges from 27.5% to 62.6%, restoring clear discrimination among strong coding models. Importantly, evolved tasks remain challenging even for the model that generates them, enabling self-improvement. We further show that RL on evolved LCB tasks improves held-out coding performance: for gpt-oss-20b, seed+evolved training achieves +8.7 and +8.3 Pass@1 gains on LCB v6 Hard and LCB-Pro Easy, exceeding seed-only gains by 70.7% and 34.8%, respectively. Our results show that BenchEvolver can convert saturated benchmarks into frontier-level evaluation suites and reusable training signal.

What Do Evolutionary Coding Agents Evolve?

Recent work pairs LLMs with evolutionary search to iteratively generate, modify, and select code using task-specific feedback. These systems have produced strong results in mathematical discovery and algorithm design, yet a fundamental question remains: what do they actually evolve? Progress is typically summarized by the best score a run reaches under a task-specific evaluator, but that score can reflect several different mechanisms: new algorithmic structure, re-tuning an existing strategy, recombining ideas already in the model's internal knowledge, or overfitting to the evaluator. Distinguishing these mechanisms requires inspecting the search process itself, not only its final outcome. We introduce EvoTrace, a dataset of evolutionary coding traces spanning four evolutionary frameworks, reasoning and non-reasoning models, and 16 tasks across mathematics and algorithm design. To analyze these traces, we develop EvoReplay, a replay-based methodology that reconstructs the local search states behind high-scoring solutions and tests controlled interventions, including adjusting constants, removing program components and substituting models or prompting contexts. We annotate every code edit in EvoTrace with one of nine recurring edit types using an LLM-as-judge pipeline validated against blind human re-annotation. Across EvoTrace, most score gains come from a small subset of these edit types. We further find a deterministic cycling pattern: about 30% of code lines added during search are byte-identical re-introductions of previously-deleted lines, present throughout nearly every run. These results show that benchmark gains in evolutionary coding agents can arise from qualitatively different mechanisms, only some of which correspond to new algorithmic structure. EvoTrace enables more diagnostic evaluation of evolutionary coding agents beyond final benchmark scores.

  • 7 authors
·
May 18

EvoGit: Decentralized Code Evolution via Git-Based Multi-Agent Collaboration

We introduce EvoGit, a decentralized multi-agent framework for collaborative software development driven by autonomous code evolution. EvoGit deploys a population of independent coding agents, each proposing edits to a shared codebase without centralized coordination, explicit message passing, or shared memory. Instead, all coordination emerges through a Git-based phylogenetic graph that tracks the full version lineage and enables agents to asynchronously read from and write to the evolving code repository. This graph-based structure supports fine-grained branching, implicit concurrency, and scalable agent interaction while preserving a consistent historical record. Human involvement is minimal but strategic: users define high-level goals, periodically review the graph, and provide lightweight feedback to promote promising directions or prune unproductive ones. Experiments demonstrate EvoGit's ability to autonomously produce functional and modular software artifacts across two real-world tasks: (1) building a web application from scratch using modern frameworks, and (2) constructing a meta-level system that evolves its own language-model-guided solver for the bin-packing optimization problem. Our results underscore EvoGit's potential to establish a new paradigm for decentralized, automated, and continual software development. EvoGit is open-sourced at https://github.com/BillHuang2001/evogit.

  • 3 authors
·
Jun 1, 2025

Top Leaderboard Ranking = Top Coding Proficiency, Always? EvoEval: Evolving Coding Benchmarks via LLM

LLMs have become the go-to choice for code generation tasks, with an exponential increase in the training, development, and usage of LLMs specifically for code generation. To evaluate the ability of LLMs on code, both academic and industry practitioners rely on popular handcrafted benchmarks. However, prior benchmarks contain only a very limited set of problems, both in quantity and variety. Further, due to popularity and age, many benchmarks are prone to data leakage where example solutions can be readily found on the web and thus potentially in training data. Such limitations inevitably lead us to inquire: Is the leaderboard performance on existing benchmarks reliable and comprehensive enough to measure the program synthesis ability of LLMs? To address this, we introduce EvoEval -- a program synthesis benchmark suite created by evolving existing benchmarks into different targeted domains for a comprehensive evaluation of LLM coding abilities. Our study on 51 LLMs shows that compared to the high performance obtained on standard benchmarks like HumanEval, there is a significant drop in performance (on average 39.4%) when using EvoEval. Additionally, the decrease in performance can range from 19.6% to 47.7%, leading to drastic ranking changes amongst LLMs and showing potential overfitting of existing benchmarks. Furthermore, we showcase various insights, including the brittleness of instruction-following models when encountering rewording or subtle changes as well as the importance of learning problem composition and decomposition. EvoEval not only provides comprehensive benchmarks, but can be used to further evolve arbitrary problems to keep up with advances and the ever-changing landscape of LLMs for code. We have open-sourced our benchmarks, tools, and complete LLM generations at https://github.com/evo-eval/evoeval

  • 3 authors
·
Mar 27, 2024

ShinkaEvolve: Towards Open-Ended And Sample-Efficient Program Evolution

We introduce ShinkaEvolve: a new open-source framework leveraging large language models (LLMs) to advance scientific discovery with state-of-the-art performance and unprecedented efficiency. Recent advances in scaling inference time compute of LLMs have enabled significant progress in generalized scientific discovery. These approaches rely on evolutionary agentic harnesses that leverage LLMs as mutation operators to generate candidate solutions. However, current code evolution methods suffer from critical limitations: they are sample inefficient, requiring thousands of samples to identify effective solutions, and remain closed-source, hindering broad adoption and extension. ShinkaEvolve addresses these limitations, introducing three key innovations: a parent sampling technique balancing exploration and exploitation, code novelty rejection-sampling for efficient search space exploration, and a bandit-based LLM ensemble selection strategy. We evaluate ShinkaEvolve across diverse tasks, demonstrating consistent improvements in sample efficiency and solution quality. ShinkaEvolve discovers a new state-of-the-art circle packing solution using only 150 samples, designs high-performing agentic harnesses for AIME mathematical reasoning tasks, identifies improvements to ALE-Bench competitive programming solutions, and discovers novel mixture-of-expert load balancing loss functions that illuminate the space of optimization strategies. Our results demonstrate that ShinkaEvolve achieves broad applicability with exceptional sample efficiency. By providing open-source accessibility and cost-efficiency, this work democratizes open-ended discovery across diverse computational problems.

  • 3 authors
·
Sep 17, 2025

ResearchEVO: An End-to-End Framework for Automated Scientific Discovery and Documentation

An important recurring pattern in scientific breakthroughs is a two-stage process: an initial phase of undirected experimentation that yields an unexpected finding, followed by a retrospective phase that explains why the finding works and situates it within existing theory. We present ResearchEVO, an end-to-end framework that computationally instantiates this discover-then-explain paradigm. The Evolution Phase employs LLM-guided bi-dimensional co-evolution -- simultaneously optimizing both algorithmic logic and overall architecture -- to search the space of code implementations purely by fitness, without requiring any understanding of the solutions it produces. The Writing Phase then takes the best-performing algorithm and autonomously generates a complete, publication-ready research paper through sentence-level retrieval-augmented generation with explicit anti-hallucination verification and automated experiment design. To our knowledge, ResearchEVO is the first system to cover this full pipeline end to end: no prior work jointly performs principled algorithm evolution and literature-grounded scientific documentation. We validate the framework on two cross-disciplinary scientific problems -- Quantum Error Correction using real Google quantum hardware data, and Physics-Informed Neural Networks -- where the Evolution Phase discovered human-interpretable algorithmic mechanisms that had not been previously proposed in the respective domain literatures. In both cases, the Writing Phase autonomously produced compilable LaTeX manuscripts that correctly grounded these blind discoveries in existing theory via RAG, with zero fabricated citations.

  • 7 authors
·
Apr 6

LLM Guided Evolution -- The Automation of Models Advancing Models

In the realm of machine learning, traditional model development and automated approaches like AutoML typically rely on layers of abstraction, such as tree-based or Cartesian genetic programming. Our study introduces "Guided Evolution" (GE), a novel framework that diverges from these methods by utilizing Large Language Models (LLMs) to directly modify code. GE leverages LLMs for a more intelligent, supervised evolutionary process, guiding mutations and crossovers. Our unique "Evolution of Thought" (EoT) technique further enhances GE by enabling LLMs to reflect on and learn from the outcomes of previous mutations. This results in a self-sustaining feedback loop that augments decision-making in model evolution. GE maintains genetic diversity, crucial for evolutionary algorithms, by leveraging LLMs' capability to generate diverse responses from expertly crafted prompts and modulate model temperature. This not only accelerates the evolution process but also injects expert like creativity and insight into the process. Our application of GE in evolving the ExquisiteNetV2 model demonstrates its efficacy: the LLM-driven GE autonomously produced variants with improved accuracy, increasing from 92.52% to 93.34%, without compromising model compactness. This underscores the potential of LLMs to accelerate the traditional model design pipeline, enabling models to autonomously evolve and enhance their own designs.

  • 3 authors
·
Mar 17, 2024

EvoScientist: Towards Multi-Agent Evolving AI Scientists for End-to-End Scientific Discovery

The increasing adoption of Large Language Models (LLMs) has enabled AI scientists to perform complex end-to-end scientific discovery tasks requiring coordination of specialized roles, including idea generation and experimental execution. However, most state-of-the-art AI scientist systems rely on static, hand-designed pipelines and fail to adapt based on accumulated interaction histories. As a result, these systems overlook promising research directions, repeat failed experiments, and pursue infeasible ideas. To address this, we introduce EvoScientist, an evolving multi-agent AI scientist framework that continuously improves research strategies through persistent memory and self-evolution. EvoScientist comprises three specialized agents: a Researcher Agent (RA) for scientific idea generation, an Engineer Agent (EA) for experiment implementation and execution, and an Evolution Manager Agent (EMA) that distills insights from prior interactions into reusable knowledge. EvoScientist contains two persistent memory modules: (i) an ideation memory, which summarizes feasible research directions from top-ranked ideas while recording previously unsuccessful directions; and (ii) an experimentation memory, which captures effective data processing and model training strategies derived from code search trajectories and best-performing implementations. These modules enable the RA and EA to retrieve relevant prior strategies, improving idea quality and code execution success rates over time. Experiments show that EvoScientist outperforms 7 open-source and commercial state-of-the-art systems in scientific idea generation, achieving higher novelty, feasibility, relevance, and clarity via automatic and human evaluation. EvoScientist also substantially improves code execution success rates through multi-agent evolution, demonstrating persistent memory's effectiveness for end-to-end scientific discovery.

  • 12 authors
·
Mar 9 5

CreativeBench: Benchmarking and Enhancing Machine Creativity via Self-Evolving Challenges

The saturation of high-quality pre-training data has shifted research focus toward evolutionary systems capable of continuously generating novel artifacts, leading to the success of AlphaEvolve. However, the progress of such systems is hindered by the lack of rigorous, quantitative evaluation. To tackle this challenge, we introduce CreativeBench, a benchmark for evaluating machine creativity in code generation, grounded in a classical cognitive framework. Comprising two subsets -- CreativeBench-Combo and CreativeBench-Explore -- the benchmark targets combinatorial and exploratory creativity through an automated pipeline utilizing reverse engineering and self-play. By leveraging executable code, CreativeBench objectively distinguishes creativity from hallucination via a unified metric defined as the product of quality and novelty. Our analysis of state-of-the-art models reveals distinct behaviors: (1) scaling significantly improves combinatorial creativity but yields diminishing returns for exploration; (2) larger models exhibit ``convergence-by-scaling,'' becoming more correct but less divergent; and (3) reasoning capabilities primarily benefit constrained exploration rather than combination. Finally, we propose EvoRePE, a plug-and-play inference-time steering strategy that internalizes evolutionary search patterns to consistently enhance machine creativity.

Breaking, Stale, or Missing? Benchmarking Coding Agents on Project-Level Test Evolution

As production code evolves, the test suite must co-evolve to remain effective. Existing benchmarks for test evolution operate at method-level granularity with pre-paired inputs, bypassing the task of locating affected tests from the full project and excluding the need for new tests entirely. We present TEBench, the first project-level benchmark for test evolution. Given a project repository and a code-changing commit, TEBench requires systems to autonomously identify tests requiring modification, determine where new tests are needed, and produce the corresponding test patch. We construct TEBench through a four-stage pipeline over Defects4J projects, curating 314 task instances from 10 projects with developer-written ground truth. Each instance is annotated with one or more of three evolution types: Test-Breaking (tests that fail), Test-Stale (tests that pass but no longer meaningfully validate updated behavior), and Test-Missing (new tests needed for introduced behavior). We evaluate seven configurations spanning three industrial agent frameworks (Claude Code, Codex CLI, OpenCode) and six base models, alongside a heuristic baseline. All seven configurations converge on an identification F1 of 45.7% to 49.4%, revealing a shared performance ceiling across both frameworks and base models. Test-Stale is the most challenging type, averaging F1 around 36%, since configurations rely on execution failure signals and lack proactive semantic reasoning. On the update task, configurations produce highly executable test modifications whose surface form diverges substantially from ground truth. Trajectory analysis reveals a reactive "execute-fail-fix" loop that succeeds for breaking tests but structurally cannot address stale or missing tests. TEBench is available at https://github.com/iSEngLab/TEBench with a leaderboard at https://tebench-leadership.vercel.app.

  • 6 authors
·
May 6

MOSS: Self-Evolution through Source-Level Rewriting in Autonomous Agent Systems

Autonomous agentic systems are largely static after deployment: they do not learn from user interactions, and recurring failures persist until the next human-driven update ships a fix. Self-evolving agents have emerged in response, but all confine evolution to text-mutable artifacts -- skill files, prompt configurations, memory schemas, workflow graphs -- and leave the agent harness untouched. Since routing, hook ordering, state invariants, and dispatch live in code rather than in any text artifact, an entire class of structural failure is physically unreachable from the text layer. We argue that source-level adaptation is a fundamentally more general medium: it is Turing-complete, a strict superset of every text-mutable scope, takes effect deterministically rather than through base-model compliance, and does not erode under long-context drift. We present MOSS, a system that performs self-rewriting at the source level on production agentic substrates. Each evolution is anchored to an automatically curated batch of production-failure evidence and proceeds through a deterministic multi-stage pipeline; code modification is delegated to a pluggable external coding-agent CLI while MOSS retains stage ordering and verdicts. Candidates are verified by replaying the batch against the candidate image in ephemeral trial workers, then promoted via user-consent-gated, in-place container swap with health-probe-gated rollback. On OpenClaw, MOSS lifts a four-task mean grader score from 0.25 to 0.61 in a single cycle without human intervention.

  • 7 authors
·
May 20

Learning to Commit: Generating Organic Pull Requests via Online Repository Memory

Large language model (LLM)-based coding agents achieve impressive results on controlled benchmarks yet routinely produce pull requests that real maintainers reject. The root cause is not functional incorrectness but a lack of organicity: generated code ignores project-specific conventions, duplicates functionality already provided by internal APIs, and violates implicit architectural constraints accumulated over years of development. Simply exposing an agent to the latest repository snapshot is not enough: the snapshot reveals the final state of the codebase, but not the repository-specific change patterns by which that state was reached. We introduce Learning to Commit, a framework that closes this gap through Online Repository Memory. Given a repository with a strict chronological split, the agent performs supervised contrastive reflection on earlier commits: it blindly attempts to resolve each historical issue, compares its prediction against the oracle diff, and distils the gap into a continuously growing set of skills-reusable patterns capturing coding style, internal API usage, and architectural invariants. When a new PR description arrives, the agent conditions its generation on these accumulated skills, producing changes grounded in the project's own evolution rather than generic pretraining priors. Evaluation is conducted on genuinely future, merged pull requests that could not have been seen during the skill-building phase, and spans multiple dimensions including functional correctness, code-style consistency, internal API reuse rate, and modified-region plausibility. Experiments on an expert-maintained repository with rich commit history show that Online Repository Memory effectively improves organicity scores on held-out future tasks.

  • 5 authors
·
Mar 27 2

Autogenesis: A Self-Evolving Agent Protocol

Recent advances in LLM based agent systems have shown promise in tackling complex, long horizon tasks. However, existing agent protocols (e.g., A2A and MCP) under specify cross entity lifecycle and context management, version tracking, and evolution safe update interfaces, which encourages monolithic compositions and brittle glue code. We introduce \textsc{Autogenesis Protocol (AGP)}, a self evolution protocol that decouples what evolves from how evolution occurs. Its Resource Substrate Protocol Layer (RSPL) models prompts, agents, tools, environments, and memory as protocol registered resourcesUnless otherwise specified, resources refer to instances of the five RSPL entity types: \emph{prompt, agent, tool, environment, memory with agent outputs.} with explicit state, lifecycle, and versioned interfaces. Its Self Evolution Protocol Layer (SEPL) specifies a closed loop operator interface for proposing, assessing, and committing improvements with auditable lineage and rollback. Building on \textsc{AGP}, we present \textsc{Autogenesis System (AGS)}, a self-evolving multi-agent system that dynamically instantiates, retrieves, and refines protocol-registered resources during execution. We evaluate \textsc{AGS} on multiple challenging benchmarks that require long horizon planning and tool use across heterogeneous resources. The results demonstrate consistent improvements over strong baselines, supporting the effectiveness of agent resource management and closed loop self evolution.

  • 1 authors
·
Apr 15

Your Agent May Misevolve: Emergent Risks in Self-evolving LLM Agents

Advances in Large Language Models (LLMs) have enabled a new class of self-evolving agents that autonomously improve through interaction with the environment, demonstrating strong capabilities. However, self-evolution also introduces novel risks overlooked by current safety research. In this work, we study the case where an agent's self-evolution deviates in unintended ways, leading to undesirable or even harmful outcomes. We refer to this as Misevolution. To provide a systematic investigation, we evaluate misevolution along four key evolutionary pathways: model, memory, tool, and workflow. Our empirical findings reveal that misevolution is a widespread risk, affecting agents built even on top-tier LLMs (e.g., Gemini-2.5-Pro). Different emergent risks are observed in the self-evolutionary process, such as the degradation of safety alignment after memory accumulation, or the unintended introduction of vulnerabilities in tool creation and reuse. To our knowledge, this is the first study to systematically conceptualize misevolution and provide empirical evidence of its occurrence, highlighting an urgent need for new safety paradigms for self-evolving agents. Finally, we discuss potential mitigation strategies to inspire further research on building safer and more trustworthy self-evolving agents. Our code and data are available at https://github.com/ShaoShuai0605/Misevolution . Warning: this paper includes examples that may be offensive or harmful in nature.

  • 11 authors
·
Sep 30, 2025 2

Mem^2Evolve: Towards Self-Evolving Agents via Co-Evolutionary Capability Expansion and Experience Distillation

While large language model--powered agents can self-evolve by accumulating experience or by dynamically creating new assets (i.e., tools or expert agents), existing frameworks typically treat these two evolutionary processes in isolation. This separation overlooks their intrinsic interdependence: the former is inherently bounded by a manually predefined static toolset, while the latter generates new assets from scratch without experiential guidance, leading to limited capability growth and unstable evolution. To address this limitation, we introduce a novel paradigm of co-evolutionary Capability Expansion and Experience Distillation. Guided by this paradigm, we propose the Mem^{textbf{2}Evolve}, which integrates two core components: Experience Memory and Asset Memory. Specifically, Mem^{2}Evolve leverages accumulated experience to guide the dynamic creation of assets, thereby expanding the agent's capability space while simultaneously acquiring new experience to achieve co-evolution. Extensive experiments across 6 task categories and 8 benchmarks demonstrate that Mem^{2}Evolve achieves improvement of 18.53\% over standard LLMs, 11.80\% over agents evolving solely through experience, and 6.46\% over those evolving solely through asset creation, establishing it as a substantially more effective and stable self-evolving agent framework. Code is available at: https://buaa-irip-llm.github.io/Mem2Evolve.

  • 10 authors
·
Apr 12

GitChameleon: Evaluating AI Code Generation Against Python Library Version Incompatibilities

The rapid evolution of software libraries poses a considerable hurdle for code generation, necessitating continuous adaptation to frequent version updates while preserving backward compatibility. While existing code evolution benchmarks provide valuable insights, they typically lack execution-based evaluation for generating code compliant with specific library versions. To address this, we introduce GitChameleon, a novel, meticulously curated dataset comprising 328 Python code completion problems, each conditioned on specific library versions and accompanied by executable unit tests. GitChameleon rigorously evaluates the capacity of contemporary large language models (LLMs), LLM-powered agents, code assistants, and RAG systems to perform version-conditioned code generation that demonstrates functional accuracy through execution. Our extensive evaluations indicate that state-of-the-art systems encounter significant challenges with this task; enterprise models achieving baseline success rates in the 48-51\% range, underscoring the intricacy of the problem. By offering an execution-based benchmark emphasizing the dynamic nature of code libraries, GitChameleon enables a clearer understanding of this challenge and helps guide the development of more adaptable and dependable AI code generation methods. We make the dataset and evaluation code publicly available at https://github.com/mrcabbage972/GitChameleonBenchmark.

  • 12 authors
·
Jul 16, 2025 1

Smaller Language Models Are Better Instruction Evolvers

Instruction tuning has been widely used to unleash the complete potential of large language models. Notably, complex and diverse instructions are of significant importance as they can effectively align models with various downstream tasks. However, current approaches to constructing large-scale instructions predominantly favour powerful models such as GPT-4 or those with over 70 billion parameters, under the empirical presumption that such larger language models (LLMs) inherently possess enhanced capabilities. In this study, we question this prevalent assumption and conduct an in-depth exploration into the potential of smaller language models (SLMs) in the context of instruction evolution. Extensive experiments across three scenarios of instruction evolution reveal that smaller language models (SLMs) can synthesize more effective instructions than LLMs. Further analysis demonstrates that SLMs possess a broader output space during instruction evolution, resulting in more complex and diverse variants. We also observe that the existing metrics fail to focus on the impact of the instructions. Thus, we propose Instruction Complex-Aware IFD (IC-IFD), which introduces instruction complexity in the original IFD score to evaluate the effectiveness of instruction data more accurately. Our source code is available at: https://github.com/HypherX/Evolution-Analysis{https://github.com/HypherX/Evolution-Analysis}

  • 6 authors
·
Dec 15, 2024 2

Evoflux: Inference-Time Evolution of Executable Tool Workflows for Compact Agents

Compact language models (LMs) reduce cost, latency, and deployment risk for tool agents. Yet MCP-style tool use requires more than isolated function calling: an agent must discover tools from live catalogs, satisfy schemas, preserve dependencies across intermediate outputs, and ground final responses in executed evidence. Small planners often generate plausible workflow graphs that fail under tool resolution, parameter validation, dependency tracking, or execution. We argue that this failure mode is poorly handled by small-corpus distillation. A few hundred teacher traces can teach workflow format, but rarely cover the recovery behavior needed to repair failed plans over changing tool catalogs. We introduce Evoflux, an inference-time evolutionary search method that treats compact tool use as the repair of executable tool workflows. It evolves typed workflow graphs through structured edits, execution feedback, adaptive intensity, meta-guided redesign, and diversity pruning. On held-out MCP-Bench tasks spanning live MCP servers and 250 tools, Evoflux raises execution feasibility from roughly 3% to 17-24% across small planners. In contrast, SFT and SFT+DPO on the same search-mined data match, underperform, or collapse below zero-shot performance; ReAct reaches higher peaks, but with higher variance and token cost. These results show that execution-grounded search is more reliable under scarce teacher-trace budgets.

Loosely-Structured Software: Engineering Context, Structure, and Evolution Entropy in Runtime-Rewired Multi-Agent Systems

As LLM-based multi-agent systems (MAS) become more autonomous, their free-form interactions increasingly dominate system behavior. However, scaling the number of agents often amplifies context pressure, coordination errors, and system drift. It is well known that building robust MAS requires more than prompt tuning or increased model intelligence. It necessitates engineering discipline focused on architecture to manage complexity under uncertainty. We characterize agentic software by a core property: runtime generation and evolution under uncertainty. Drawing upon and extending software engineering experience, especially object-oriented programming, this paper introduces Loosely-Structured Software (LSS), a new class of software systems that shifts the engineering focus from constructing deterministic logic to managing the runtime entropy generated by View-constructed programming, semantic-driven self-organization, and endogenous evolution. To make this entropy governable, we introduce design principles under a three-layer engineering framework: View/Context Engineering to manage the execution environment and maintain task-relevant Views, Structure Engineering to organize dynamic binding over artifacts and agents, and Evolution Engineering to govern the lifecycle of self-rewriting artifacts. Building on this framework, we develop LSS design patterns as semantic control blocks that stabilize fluid, inference-mediated interactions while preserving agent adaptability. Together, these abstractions improve the designability, scalability, and evolvability of agentic infrastructure. We provide basic experimental validation of key mechanisms, demonstrating the effectiveness of LSS.

  • 4 authors
·
Mar 15

A Survey of Self-Evolving Agents: On Path to Artificial Super Intelligence

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated strong capabilities but remain fundamentally static, unable to adapt their internal parameters to novel tasks, evolving knowledge domains, or dynamic interaction contexts. As LLMs are increasingly deployed in open-ended, interactive environments, this static nature has become a critical bottleneck, necessitating agents that can adaptively reason, act, and evolve in real time. This paradigm shift -- from scaling static models to developing self-evolving agents -- has sparked growing interest in architectures and methods enabling continual learning and adaptation from data, interactions, and experiences. This survey provides the first systematic and comprehensive review of self-evolving agents, organized around three foundational dimensions -- what to evolve, when to evolve, and how to evolve. We examine evolutionary mechanisms across agent components (e.g., models, memory, tools, architecture), categorize adaptation methods by stages (e.g., intra-test-time, inter-test-time), and analyze the algorithmic and architectural designs that guide evolutionary adaptation (e.g., scalar rewards, textual feedback, single-agent and multi-agent systems). Additionally, we analyze evaluation metrics and benchmarks tailored for self-evolving agents, highlight applications in domains such as coding, education, and healthcare, and identify critical challenges and research directions in safety, scalability, and co-evolutionary dynamics. By providing a structured framework for understanding and designing self-evolving agents, this survey establishes a roadmap for advancing adaptive agentic systems in both research and real-world deployments, ultimately shedding lights to pave the way for the realization of Artificial Super Intelligence (ASI), where agents evolve autonomously, performing at or beyond human-level intelligence across a wide array of tasks.

  • 27 authors
·
Jul 28, 2025 4

Evolutionary Generation of Multi-Agent Systems

Large language model (LLM)-based multi-agent systems (MAS) show strong promise for complex reasoning, planning, and tool-augmented tasks, but designing effective MAS architectures remains labor-intensive, brittle, and hard to generalize. Existing automatic MAS generation methods either rely on code generation, which often leads to executability and robustness failures, or impose rigid architectural templates that limit expressiveness and adaptability. We propose Evolutionary Generation of Multi-Agent Systems (EvoMAS), which formulates MAS generation as structured configuration generation. EvoMAS performs evolutionary generation in configuration space. Specifically, EvoMAS selects initial configurations from a pool, applies feedback-conditioned mutation and crossover guided by execution traces, and iteratively refines both the candidate pool and an experience memory. We evaluate EvoMAS on diverse benchmarks, including BBEH, SWE-Bench, and WorkBench, covering reasoning, software engineering, and tool-use tasks. EvoMAS consistently improves task performance over both human-designed MAS and prior automatic MAS generation methods, while producing generated systems with higher executability and runtime robustness. EvoMAS outperforms the agent evolution method EvoAgent by +10.5 points on BBEH reasoning and +7.1 points on WorkBench. With Claude-4.5-Sonnet, EvoMAS also reaches 79.1% on SWE-Bench-Verified, matching the top of the leaderboard.

  • 7 authors
·
Feb 10

Social Life of Code: Modeling Evolution through Code Embedding and Opinion Dynamics

Software repositories provide a detailed record of software evolution by capturing developer interactions through code-related activities such as pull requests and modifications. To better understand the underlying dynamics of codebase evolution, we introduce a novel approach that integrates semantic code embeddings with opinion dynamics theory, offering a quantitative framework to analyze collaborative development processes. Our approach begins by encoding code snippets into high-dimensional vector representations using state-of-the-art code embedding models, preserving both syntactic and semantic features. These embeddings are then processed using Principal Component Analysis (PCA) for dimensionality reduction, with data normalized to ensure comparability. We model temporal evolution using the Expressed-Private Opinion (EPO) model to derive trust matrices and track opinion trajectories across development cycles. These opinion trajectories reflect the underlying dynamics of consensus formation, influence propagation, and evolving alignment (or divergence) within developer communities -- revealing implicit collaboration patterns and knowledge-sharing mechanisms that are otherwise difficult to observe. By bridging software engineering and computational social science, our method provides a principled way to quantify software evolution, offering new insights into developer influence, consensus formation, and project sustainability. We evaluate our approach on data from three prominent open-source GitHub repositories, demonstrating its ability to reveal interpretable behavioral trends and variations in developer interactions. The results highlight the utility of our framework in improving open-source project maintenance through data-driven analysis of collaboration dynamics.

  • 3 authors
·
Feb 17

GigaEvo: An Open Source Optimization Framework Powered By LLMs And Evolution Algorithms

Recent advances in LLM-guided evolutionary computation, particularly AlphaEvolve (Novikov et al., 2025; Georgiev et al., 2025), have demonstrated remarkable success in discovering novel mathematical constructions and solving challenging optimization problems. However, the high-level descriptions in published work leave many implementation details unspecified, hindering reproducibility and further research. In this report we present GigaEvo, an extensible open-source framework that enables researchers to study and experiment with hybrid LLM-evolution approaches inspired by AlphaEvolve. Our system provides modular implementations of key components: MAP-Elites quality-diversity algorithms, asynchronous DAG-based evaluation pipelines, LLM-driven mutation operators with insight generation and bidirectional lineage tracking, and flexible multi-island evolutionary strategies. In order to assess reproducibility and validate our implementation we evaluate GigaEvo on challenging problems from the AlphaEvolve paper: Heilbronn triangle placement, circle packing in squares, and high-dimensional kissing numbers. The framework emphasizes modularity, concurrency, and ease of experimentation, enabling rapid prototyping through declarative configuration. We provide detailed descriptions of system architecture, implementation decisions, and experimental methodology to support further research in LLM driven evolutionary methods. The GigaEvo framework and all experimental code are available at https://github.com/AIRI-Institute/gigaevo-core.

Code-Guided Reasoning for Small Language Models: Evaluating Executable MCQA Scaffolds

Multiple-choice QA benchmarks usually evaluate small language models (SLMs) as direct answerers, but deployed language-model systems increasingly rely on external scaffolds such as tools, code, and repeated model calls. We introduce Code-Guided Reasoning (CGR), an evaluation protocol and generated-program resource for measuring when executable reasoning scaffolds improve SLM performance on MCQA tasks. CGR standardizes six components: a normalized item interface, a direct solver prompt, a generator prompt, a Python scaffold, solver-call and extraction helpers, and a three-channel result record. On 20,498 retained result rows from a locally prepared MCQA bundle and six metadata-registered solver models, the observed non-zero-baseline partition shows 66.21% macro assisted accuracy versus 38.11% direct accuracy, a +28.10 percentage-point difference with a pair-bootstrap interval of [20.32, 36.43]. Under a stricter Ab > 30% direct-signal gate, the macro difference is +14.11 points. These estimates are descriptive. Assisted inference uses a larger solver-call budget, answer extraction is brittle, Time-MQA contains the observed regressions, and some generated programs violate the no-hard-coding instruction. CGR provides the trace package needed to interpret these results, including direct, assisted, and generator-side answers, partition definitions, generated programs, response metadata, and audits.

ibm IBM
·
May 11 1

A Comprehensive Survey of Self-Evolving AI Agents: A New Paradigm Bridging Foundation Models and Lifelong Agentic Systems

Recent advances in large language models have sparked growing interest in AI agents capable of solving complex, real-world tasks. However, most existing agent systems rely on manually crafted configurations that remain static after deployment, limiting their ability to adapt to dynamic and evolving environments. To this end, recent research has explored agent evolution techniques that aim to automatically enhance agent systems based on interaction data and environmental feedback. This emerging direction lays the foundation for self-evolving AI agents, which bridge the static capabilities of foundation models with the continuous adaptability required by lifelong agentic systems. In this survey, we provide a comprehensive review of existing techniques for self-evolving agentic systems. Specifically, we first introduce a unified conceptual framework that abstracts the feedback loop underlying the design of self-evolving agentic systems. The framework highlights four key components: System Inputs, Agent System, Environment, and Optimisers, serving as a foundation for understanding and comparing different strategies. Based on this framework, we systematically review a wide range of self-evolving techniques that target different components of the agent system. We also investigate domain-specific evolution strategies developed for specialised fields such as biomedicine, programming, and finance, where optimisation objectives are tightly coupled with domain constraints. In addition, we provide a dedicated discussion on the evaluation, safety, and ethical considerations for self-evolving agentic systems, which are critical to ensuring their effectiveness and reliability. This survey aims to provide researchers and practitioners with a systematic understanding of self-evolving AI agents, laying the foundation for the development of more adaptive, autonomous, and lifelong agentic systems.

  • 15 authors
·
Aug 10, 2025 2

EvolveMem:Self-Evolving Memory Architecture via AutoResearch for LLM Agents

Long-term memory is essential for LLM agents that operate across multiple sessions, yet existing memory systems treat retrieval infrastructure as fixed: stored content evolves while scoring functions, fusion strategies, and answer-generation policies remain frozen at deployment. We argue that truly adaptive memory requires co-evolution at two levels: the stored knowledge and the retrieval mechanism that queries it. We present EvolveMem, a self-evolving memory architecture that exposes its full retrieval configuration as a structured action space optimized by an LLM-powered diagnosis module. In each evolution round, the module reads per-question failure logs, identifies root causes, and proposes targeted configuration adjustments; a guarded meta-analyzer applies them with automatic revert-on-regression and explore-on-stagnation safeguards. This closed-loop self-evolution realizes an AutoResearch process: the system autonomously conducts iterative research cycles on its own architecture, replacing manual configuration tuning. Starting from a minimal baseline, the process converges autonomously, discovering effective retrieval strategies including entirely new configuration dimensions not present in the original action space. On LoCoMo, EvolveMem outperforms the strongest baseline by 25.7% relative and achieves a 78.0% relative improvement over the minimal baseline. On MemBench, EvolveMem exceeds the strongest baseline by 18.9% relative. Evolved configurations transfer across benchmarks with positive rather than catastrophic transfer, indicating that the self-evolution process captures universal retrieval principles rather than benchmark-specific heuristics. Code is available at https://github.com/aiming-lab/SimpleMem.

  • 7 authors
·
May 12 2

AI Agentic Programming: A Survey of Techniques, Challenges, and Opportunities

AI agentic programming is an emerging paradigm in which large language models (LLMs) autonomously plan, execute, and interact with external tools like compilers, debuggers, and version control systems to iteratively perform complex software development tasks. Unlike conventional code generation tools, agentic systems are capable of decomposing high-level goals, coordinating multi-step processes, and adapting their behavior based on intermediate feedback. These capabilities are transforming the software development practice. As this emerging field evolves rapidly, there is a need to define its scope, consolidate its technical foundations, and identify open research challenges. This survey provides a comprehensive and timely review of AI agentic programming. We introduce a taxonomy of agent behaviors and system architectures, and examine core techniques including planning, memory and context management, tool integration, and execution monitoring. We also analyze existing benchmarks and evaluation methodologies used to assess coding agent performance. Our study identifies several key challenges, including limitations in handling long context, a lack of persistent memory across tasks, and concerns around safety, alignment with user intent, and collaboration with human developers. We discuss emerging opportunities to improve the reliability, adaptability, and transparency of agentic systems. By synthesizing recent advances and outlining future directions, this survey aims to provide a foundation for research and development in building the next generation of intelligent and trustworthy AI coding agents.

  • 4 authors
·
Aug 14, 2025

EvolveR: Self-Evolving LLM Agents through an Experience-Driven Lifecycle

Current Large Language Model (LLM) agents show strong performance in tool use, but lack the crucial capability to systematically learn from their own experiences. While existing frameworks mainly focus on mitigating external knowledge gaps, they fail to address a more fundamental limitation: the inability to iteratively refine problem-solving strategies. In this work, we introduce EvolveR, a framework designed to enable agent to self-improve through a complete, closed-loop experience lifecycle. This lifecycle comprises two key stages: (1) Offline Self-Distillation, where the agent's interaction trajectories are synthesized into a structured repository of abstract, reusable strategic principles; (2) Online Interaction, where the agent interacts with tasks and actively retrieves distilled principles to guide its decision-making, accumulating a diverse set of behavioral trajectories. This loop employs a policy reinforcement mechanism to iteratively update the agent based on its performance. We demonstrate the effectiveness of EvolveR on complex multi-hop question-answering benchmarks, where it achieves superior performance over strong agentic baselines. Our work presents a comprehensive blueprint for agents that learn not only from external data but also from the consequences of their own actions, paving the way for more autonomous and continuously improving systems. Code is available at https://github.com/Edaizi/EvolveR.

  • 11 authors
·
Oct 17, 2025

REACCEPT: Automated Co-evolution of Production and Test Code Based on Dynamic Validation and Large Language Models

Synchronizing production and test code, known as PT co-evolution, is critical for software quality in the software development lifecycle. Existing methods for automatic PT co-evolution either utilize predefined heuristic rules or rely on simple application of machine learning techniques. Due to the limitations of underlying techniques, existing methods either only partially automate PT co-evolution (e.g., only automate obsolete test code identification) or result in low accuracy. In this paper, we propose REACCEPT, a novel approach that leverages large language models and dynamic validation to fully automate PT co-evolution (i.e., capable of both identifying and updating obsolete test cases). REACCEPT relies on experience-based prompt template generation, dynamic validation, and retrieval-augmented generation techniques to accomplish automated PT co-evolution. To evaluate REACCEPT's effectiveness, we extensive experiments with a dataset of 537 Java projects and compared REACCEPT's performance with several state-of-the-art methods. Results show that REACCEPT achieved an update accuracy of 60.16% on correctly identified obsolete test code, surpassing the state-of-the-art technique CEPROT by 90%. This confirms that REACCEPT can effectively assist developers in maintaining test code, improving overall software quality and reducing maintenance effort.

  • 7 authors
·
Nov 17, 2024

MetaAgent-X : Breaking the Ceiling of Automatic Multi-Agent Systems via End-to-End Reinforcement Learning

Automatic multi-agent systems aim to instantiate agent workflows without relying on manually designed or fixed orchestration. However, existing automatic MAS approaches remain only partially adaptive: they either perform training-free test-time search or optimize the meta-level designer while keeping downstream execution agents frozen, which creating a frozen-executor ceiling and leaving the end-to-end training of self-designing and self-executing agentic models unexplored. To address this, we introduce MetaAgent-X, an end-to-end reinforcement learning framework that jointly optimizes automatic MAS design and execution. MetaAgent-X enables script-based MAS generation, execution rollout collection, and credit assignment for both designer and executor trajectories. To support stable and scalable optimization, we propose Executor Designer Hierarchical Rollout and Stagewise Co-evolution to improve training stability and expose the dynamics of designer-executor co-evolution. MetaAgent-X consistently outperforms existing automatic MAS baselines, achieving up to 21.7% gains. Comprehensive ablations show that both designer and executor improve throughout training, and that effective automatic MAS learning follows a stagewise co-evolution process. These results establish end-to-end trainable automatic MAS as a practical paradigm for building self-designing and self-executing agentic models.

EvoArena: Tracking Memory Evolution for Robust LLM Agents in Dynamic Environments

Large language model (LLM) agents have achieved strong performance on a wide range of benchmarks, yet most evaluations assume static environments. In contrast, real-world deployment is inherently dynamic, requiring agents to continually align their knowledge, skills, and behavior with changing environments and updated task conditions. To address this gap, we introduce EvoArena, a benchmark suite that models environment changes as sequences of progressive updates across terminal, software, and social domains. We further propose EvoMem, a patch-based memory paradigm that records memory evolution as structured update histories, enabling agents to reason about environmental evolution through changes in their memory. Experiments show that current agents struggle on EvoArena, achieving an average accuracy of 39.6% across evolving terminal, software, and social-preference domains. EvoMem consistently improves performance, yielding an average gain of 1.5% on EvoArena and also improving standard benchmarks such as GAIA and LoCoMo by 6.1% and 4.8%. Beyond individual tasks, EvoMem further improves chain-level accuracy by 3.7% on EvoArena, where success requires completing a consecutive sequence of related evolutionary subtasks. Mechanistic analysis shows that EvoMem improves evidence capture in the memory, indicating better preservation of complete evolving environment states. Our results highlight the importance of modeling evolution in both evaluation and memory for reliable agent deployment.

AlphaEvolve: A coding agent for scientific and algorithmic discovery

In this white paper, we present AlphaEvolve, an evolutionary coding agent that substantially enhances capabilities of state-of-the-art LLMs on highly challenging tasks such as tackling open scientific problems or optimizing critical pieces of computational infrastructure. AlphaEvolve orchestrates an autonomous pipeline of LLMs, whose task is to improve an algorithm by making direct changes to the code. Using an evolutionary approach, continuously receiving feedback from one or more evaluators, AlphaEvolve iteratively improves the algorithm, potentially leading to new scientific and practical discoveries. We demonstrate the broad applicability of this approach by applying it to a number of important computational problems. When applied to optimizing critical components of large-scale computational stacks at Google, AlphaEvolve developed a more efficient scheduling algorithm for data centers, found a functionally equivalent simplification in the circuit design of hardware accelerators, and accelerated the training of the LLM underpinning AlphaEvolve itself. Furthermore, AlphaEvolve discovered novel, provably correct algorithms that surpass state-of-the-art solutions on a spectrum of problems in mathematics and computer science, significantly expanding the scope of prior automated discovery methods (Romera-Paredes et al., 2023). Notably, AlphaEvolve developed a search algorithm that found a procedure to multiply two 4 times 4 complex-valued matrices using 48 scalar multiplications; offering the first improvement, after 56 years, over Strassen's algorithm in this setting. We believe AlphaEvolve and coding agents like it can have a significant impact in improving solutions of problems across many areas of science and computation.

  • 18 authors
·
Jun 16, 2025

EVOC2RUST: A Skeleton-guided Framework for Project-Level C-to-Rust Translation

Rust's compile-time safety guarantees make it ideal for safety-critical systems, creating demand for translating legacy C codebases to Rust. While various approaches have emerged for this task, they face inherent trade-offs: rule-based solutions face challenges in meeting code safety and idiomaticity requirements, while LLM-based solutions often fail to generate semantically equivalent Rust code, due to the heavy dependencies of modules across the entire codebase. Recent studies have revealed that both solutions are limited to small-scale programs. In this paper, we propose EvoC2Rust, an automated framework for converting entire C projects to equivalent Rust ones. EvoC2Rust employs a skeleton-guided translation strategy for project-level translation. The pipeline consists of three evolutionary stages: 1) it first decomposes the C project into functional modules, employs a feature-mapping-enhanced LLM to transform definitions and macros and generates type-checked function stubs, which form a compilable Rust skeleton; 2) it then incrementally translates the function, replacing the corresponding stub placeholder; 3) finally, it repairs compilation errors by integrating LLM and static analysis. Through evolutionary augmentation, EvoC2Rust combines the advantages of both rule-based and LLM-based solutions. Our evaluation on open-source benchmarks and six industrial projects demonstrates EvoC2Rust's superior performance in project-level C-to-Rust translation. On average, it achieves 17.24% and 14.32% improvements in syntax and semantic accuracy over the LLM-based approaches, along with a 96.79% higher code safety rate than the rule-based tools. At the module level, EvoC2Rust reaches 92.25% compilation and 89.53% test pass rates on industrial projects, even for complex codebases and long functions.

  • 8 authors
·
Aug 6, 2025 2

ThetaEvolve: Test-time Learning on Open Problems

Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have enabled breakthroughs in mathematical discovery, exemplified by AlphaEvolve, a closed-source system that evolves programs to improve bounds on open problems. However, it relies on ensembles of frontier LLMs to achieve new bounds and is a pure inference system that models cannot internalize the evolving strategies. We introduce ThetaEvolve, an open-source framework that simplifies and extends AlphaEvolve to efficiently scale both in-context learning and Reinforcement Learning (RL) at test time, allowing models to continually learn from their experiences in improving open optimization problems. ThetaEvolve features a single LLM, a large program database for enhanced exploration, batch sampling for higher throughput, lazy penalties to discourage stagnant outputs, and optional reward shaping for stable training signals, etc. ThetaEvolve is the first evolving framework that enable a small open-source model, like DeepSeek-R1-0528-Qwen3-8B, to achieve new best-known bounds on open problems (circle packing and first auto-correlation inequality) mentioned in AlphaEvolve. Besides, across two models and four open tasks, we find that ThetaEvolve with RL at test-time consistently outperforms inference-only baselines, and the model indeed learns evolving capabilities, as the RL-trained checkpoints demonstrate faster progress and better final performance on both trained target task and other unseen tasks. We release our code publicly: https://github.com/ypwang61/ThetaEvolve

  • 16 authors
·
Nov 28, 2025

EvoAgentX: An Automated Framework for Evolving Agentic Workflows

Multi-agent systems (MAS) have emerged as a powerful paradigm for orchestrating large language models (LLMs) and specialized tools to collaboratively address complex tasks. However, existing MAS frameworks often require manual workflow configuration and lack native support for dynamic evolution and performance optimization. In addition, many MAS optimization algorithms are not integrated into a unified framework. In this paper, we present EvoAgentX, an open-source platform that automates the generation, execution, and evolutionary optimization of multi-agent workflows. EvoAgentX employs a modular architecture consisting of five core layers: the basic components, agent, workflow, evolving, and evaluation layers. Specifically, within the evolving layer, EvoAgentX integrates three MAS optimization algorithms, TextGrad, AFlow, and MIPRO, to iteratively refine agent prompts, tool configurations, and workflow topologies. We evaluate EvoAgentX on HotPotQA, MBPP, and MATH for multi-hop reasoning, code generation, and mathematical problem solving, respectively, and further assess it on real-world tasks using GAIA. Experimental results show that EvoAgentX consistently achieves significant performance improvements, including a 7.44% increase in HotPotQA F1, a 10.00% improvement in MBPP pass@1, a 10.00% gain in MATH solve accuracy, and an overall accuracy improvement of up to 20.00% on GAIA. The source code is available at: https://github.com/EvoAgentX/EvoAgentX

  • 4 authors
·
Jul 4, 2025

Solvita: Enhancing Large Language Models for Competitive Programming via Agentic Evolution

Large language models (LLMs) still struggle with the rigorous reasoning demands of hard competitive programming. While recent multi-agent frameworks attempt to bridge this reliability gap, they remain fundamentally stateless: they rely on static retrieval and discard the valuable problem-solving and debugging experience gained from previous tasks. To address this, we present Solvita, an agentic evolution framework that enables continuous learning without requiring weight updates to the underlying LLM. Solvita reorganizes problem-solving into a closed-loop system of strategy selection, program synthesis, certified supervision, and targeted hacking, executed by four specialized agents: Planner, Solver, Oracle, and Hacker. Crucially, each agent is paired with a trainable, graph-structured knowledge network. As the system operates, outcome signals, such as pass/fail verdicts, test certification quality, and adversarial vulnerabilities discovered by the Hacker, are recast as reinforcement learning updates to these network weights. This allows the agents to dynamically route future queries based on past successes and failures, effectively accumulating transferable reasoning experience over time. Evaluated across CodeContests, APPS, AetherCode, and live Codeforces rounds, Solvita establishes a new state-of-the-art among code-generation agents, outperforming existing multi-agent pipelines and nearly doubling the accuracy of single-pass baselines.

NJU-LINK NJU-LINK Lab
·
May 13 1

MemEvolve: Meta-Evolution of Agent Memory Systems

Self-evolving memory systems are unprecedentedly reshaping the evolutionary paradigm of large language model (LLM)-based agents. Prior work has predominantly relied on manually engineered memory architectures to store trajectories, distill experience, and synthesize reusable tools, enabling agents to evolve on the fly within environment interactions. However, this paradigm is fundamentally constrained by the staticity of the memory system itself: while memory facilitates agent-level evolving, the underlying memory architecture cannot be meta-adapted to diverse task contexts. To address this gap, we propose MemEvolve, a meta-evolutionary framework that jointly evolves agents' experiential knowledge and their memory architecture, allowing agent systems not only to accumulate experience but also to progressively refine how they learn from it. To ground MemEvolve in prior research and foster openness in future self-evolving systems, we introduce EvolveLab, a unified self-evolving memory codebase that distills twelve representative memory systems into a modular design space (encode, store, retrieve, manage), providing both a standardized implementation substrate and a fair experimental arena. Extensive evaluations on four challenging agentic benchmarks demonstrate that MemEvolve achieves (I) substantial performance gains, improving frameworks such as SmolAgent and Flash-Searcher by up to 17.06%; and (II) strong cross-task and cross-LLM generalization, designing memory architectures that transfer effectively across diverse benchmarks and backbone models.

  • 8 authors
·
Dec 21, 2025 2

MMEvol: Empowering Multimodal Large Language Models with Evol-Instruct

The development of Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) has seen significant advancements. However, the quantity and quality of multimodal instruction data have emerged as significant bottlenecks in their progress. Manually creating multimodal instruction data is both time-consuming and inefficient, posing challenges in producing instructions of high complexity. Moreover, distilling instruction data from black-box commercial models (e.g., GPT-4o, GPT-4V) often results in simplistic instruction data, which constrains performance to that of these models. The challenge of curating diverse and complex instruction data remains substantial. We propose MMEvol, a novel multimodal instruction data evolution framework that combines fine-grained perception evolution, cognitive reasoning evolution, and interaction evolution. This iterative approach breaks through data quality bottlenecks to generate a complex and diverse image-text instruction dataset, thereby empowering MLLMs with enhanced capabilities. Beginning with an initial set of instructions, SEED-163K, we utilize MMEvol to systematically broadens the diversity of instruction types, integrates reasoning steps to enhance cognitive capabilities, and extracts detailed information from images to improve visual understanding and robustness. To comprehensively evaluate the effectiveness of our data, we train LLaVA-NeXT using the evolved data and conduct experiments across 13 vision-language tasks. Compared to the baseline trained with seed data, our approach achieves an average accuracy improvement of 3.1 points and reaches state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance on 9 of these tasks.

  • 16 authors
·
Sep 9, 2024 3

CreativeGame:Toward Mechanic-Aware Creative Game Generation

Large language models can generate plausible game code, but turning this capability into iterative creative improvement remains difficult. In practice, single-shot generation often produces brittle runtime behavior, weak accumulation of experience across versions, and creativity scores that are too subjective to serve as reliable optimization signals. A further limitation is that mechanics are frequently treated only as post-hoc descriptions, rather than as explicit objects that can be planned, tracked, preserved, and evaluated during generation. This report presents CreativeGame, a multi-agent system for iterative HTML5 game generation that addresses these issues through four coupled ideas: a proxy reward centered on programmatic signals rather than pure LLM judgment; lineage-scoped memory for cross-version experience accumulation; runtime validation integrated into both repair and reward; and a mechanic-guided planning loop in which retrieved mechanic knowledge is converted into an explicit mechanic plan before code generation begins. The goal is not merely to produce a playable artifact in one step, but to support interpretable version-to-version evolution. The current system contains 71 stored lineages, 88 saved nodes, and a 774-entry global mechanic archive, implemented in 6{,}181 lines of Python together with inspection and visualization tooling. The system is therefore substantial enough to support architectural analysis, reward inspection, and real lineage-level case studies rather than only prompt-level demos. A real 4-generation lineage shows that mechanic-level innovation can emerge in later versions and can be inspected directly through version-to-version records. The central contribution is therefore not only game generation, but a concrete pipeline for observing progressive evolution through explicit mechanic change.

  • 9 authors
·
Apr 20 1

ASI-Evolve: AI Accelerates AI

Can AI accelerate the development of AI itself? While recent agentic systems have shown strong performance on well-scoped tasks with rapid feedback, it remains unclear whether they can tackle the costly, long-horizon, and weakly supervised research loops that drive real AI progress. We present ASI-Evolve, an agentic framework for AI-for-AI research that closes this loop through a learn-design-experiment-analyze cycle. ASI-Evolve augments standard evolutionary agents with two key components: a cognition base that injects accumulated human priors into each round of exploration, and a dedicated analyzer that distills complex experimental outcomes into reusable insights for future iterations. To our knowledge, ASI-Evolve is the first unified framework to demonstrate AI-driven discovery across three central components of AI development: data, architectures, and learning algorithms. In neural architecture design, it discovered 105 SOTA linear attention architectures, with the best discovered model surpassing DeltaNet by +0.97 points, nearly 3x the gain of recent human-designed improvements. In pretraining data curation, the evolved pipeline improves average benchmark performance by +3.96 points, with gains exceeding 18 points on MMLU. In reinforcement learning algorithm design, discovered algorithms outperform GRPO by up to +12.5 points on AMC32, +11.67 points on AIME24, and +5.04 points on OlympiadBench. We further provide initial evidence that this AI-for-AI paradigm can transfer beyond the AI stack through experiments in mathematics and biomedicine. Together, these results suggest that ASI-Evolve represents a promising step toward enabling AI to accelerate AI across the foundational stages of development, offering early evidence for the feasibility of closed-loop AI research.

GAIR SII - GAIR
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Mar 30 2

NEMO: Execution-Aware Optimization Modeling via Autonomous Coding Agents

In this paper, we present NEMO, a system that translates Natural-language descriptions of decision problems into formal Executable Mathematical Optimization implementations, operating collaboratively with users or autonomously. Existing approaches typically rely on specialized large language models (LLMs) or bespoke, task-specific agents. Such methods are often brittle, complex and frequently generating syntactically invalid or non-executable code. NEMO instead centers on remote interaction with autonomous coding agents (ACAs), treated as a first-class abstraction analogous to API-based interaction with LLMs. This design enables the construction of higher-level systems around ACAs that structure, consolidate, and iteratively refine task specifications. Because ACAs execute within sandboxed environments, code produced by NEMO is executable by construction, allowing automated validation and repair. Building on this, we introduce novel coordination patterns with and across ACAs, including asymmetric validation loops between independently generated optimizer and simulator implementations (serving as a high-level validation mechanism), external memory for experience reuse, and robustness enhancements via minimum Bayes risk (MBR) decoding and self-consistency. We evaluate NEMO on nine established optimization benchmarks. As depicted in Figure 1, it achieves state-of-the-art performance on the majority of tasks, with substantial margins on several datasets, demonstrating the power of execution-aware agentic architectures for automated optimization modeling.

  • 6 authors
·
Jan 28

EvoSkill: Automated Skill Discovery for Multi-Agent Systems

Coding agents are increasingly used as general-purpose problem solvers, but their flexibility does not by itself confer the domain expertise needed for specialized tasks. Recent work addresses this through agent skills: reusable workflows, and code, that augment agents with domain-specific capabilities. Most skills today are hand-crafted, and existing evolutionary approaches optimize low-level artifacts (e.g. prompts \& code) that are tightly coupled to specific models and tasks. We introduce EvoSkill, a self-evolving framework that automatically discovers and refines agent skills through iterative failure analysis. EvoSkill analyzes execution failures, proposes new skills or edits to existing ones, and materializes them into structured, reusable skill folders. A Pareto frontier of agent programs governs selection, retaining only skills that improve held-out validation performance while the underlying model remains frozen. We evaluate EvoSkill on two benchmarks: OfficeQA, a grounded reasoning benchmark over U.S.\ Treasury data, where it improves exact-match accuracy by 7.3\% (60.6\% to 67.9\%); and SealQA, a search-augmented QA benchmark with noisy retrieval, where it yields a 12.1\% gain (26.6\% to 38.7\%). We also investigate the zero-shot transfer capabilties of skills evolved on one task to the other; in particular: skills evolved from SealQA transfers zero-shot to BrowseComp, improving accuracy by 5.3\% without modification demonstrating that skill-level optimization produces transferable capabilities beyond the training task.

  • 5 authors
·
Mar 3

CodeChain: Towards Modular Code Generation Through Chain of Self-revisions with Representative Sub-modules

Large Language Models (LLMs) have already become quite proficient at solving simpler programming tasks like those in HumanEval or MBPP benchmarks. However, solving more complex and competitive programming tasks is still quite challenging for these models - possibly due to their tendency to generate solutions as monolithic code blocks instead of decomposing them into logical sub-tasks and sub-modules. On the other hand, experienced programmers instinctively write modularized code with abstraction for solving complex tasks, often reusing previously developed modules. To address this gap, we propose CodeChain, a novel framework for inference that elicits modularized code generation through a chain of self-revisions, each being guided by some representative sub-modules generated in previous iterations. Concretely, CodeChain first instructs the LLM to generate modularized codes through chain-of-thought prompting. Then it applies a chain of self-revisions by iterating the two steps: 1) extracting and clustering the generated sub-modules and selecting the cluster representatives as the more generic and re-usable implementations, and 2) augmenting the original chain-of-thought prompt with these selected module-implementations and instructing the LLM to re-generate new modularized solutions. We find that by naturally encouraging the LLM to reuse the previously developed and verified sub-modules, CodeChain can significantly boost both modularity as well as correctness of the generated solutions, achieving relative pass@1 improvements of 35% on APPS and 76% on CodeContests. It is shown to be effective on both OpenAI LLMs as well as open-sourced LLMs like WizardCoder. We also conduct comprehensive ablation studies with different methods of prompting, number of clusters, model sizes, program qualities, etc., to provide useful insights that underpin CodeChain's success.

  • 6 authors
·
Oct 13, 2023 1

The Biomimetic Architecture of Software 4.0

Dominant programming paradigms inherit an execution model optimised for a bygone era of a single human mind instructing a local machine, leaving contemporary systems burdened with historical path dependencies. When forced to host multi-dimensional, connectionist intelligence, this brittle assembly model fractures under the weight of a profound probabilistic-symbolic impedance mismatch. While contemporary Software 3.x frameworks attempt to patch the mismatch by encasing large language models (LLMs) in increasingly complicated external harnesses, this spiralling architectural complexity only compounds the carrying cost of static code assembly. To address the cause rather than the effects, this paper introduces Software 4.0 -- an autopoietic heterarchy of human intelligence, neural AI, and natively reflective symbolic substrate. Under this paradigm, software is transformed from an inert corpus to be parsed into a self-regulating metabolic network that natively verifies, modifies, and evolves its own structural integrity. We present Recognitive, the programming language and platform that materialises this architecture. By offloading the burden of structural verification to a deterministic substrate, it unlocks a superior inference-time scaling regime -- one where connectionist compute translates entirely into deep semantic exploration and hypothesis traversal rather than the ruinous computational and financial cost of simulating structural constraints probabilistically. Moving beyond the legacy 'Software Factory' mindset, we outline the theoretical foundations required to ground connectionist intent and arrive fully in the intelligence age. This is a foundational vision paper; empirical evaluation and formal specification of the type system and operational semantics are the subject of future work.

  • 2 authors
·
May 31

Teach Better or Show Smarter? On Instructions and Exemplars in Automatic Prompt Optimization

Large language models have demonstrated remarkable capabilities, but their performance is heavily reliant on effective prompt engineering. Automatic prompt optimization (APO) methods are designed to automate this and can be broadly categorized into those targeting instructions (instruction optimization, IO) vs. those targeting exemplars (exemplar selection, ES). Despite their shared objective, these have evolved rather independently, with IO recently receiving more research attention. This paper seeks to bridge this gap by comprehensively comparing the performance of representative IO and ES techniques, both isolation and combination, on a diverse set of challenging tasks. Our findings reveal that intelligently reusing model-generated input-output pairs obtained from evaluating prompts on the validation set as exemplars consistently improves performance over IO methods but is currently under-investigated. We also find that despite the recent focus on IO, how we select exemplars can outweigh how we optimize instructions, with ES strategies as simple as random search outperforming state-of-the-art IO methods with seed instructions without any optimization. Moreover, we observe synergy between ES and IO, with optimal combinations surpassing individual contributions. We conclude that studying exemplar selection as a standalone method and its optimal combination with instruction optimization remains a crucial aspect of APO and deserves greater consideration in future research, even in the era of highly capable instruction-following models.

  • 4 authors
·
Jun 21, 2024

RepoZero: Can LLMs Generate a Code Repository from Scratch?

Large Language Models (LLMs) have recently shown remarkable progress in code generation, yet their ability to construct complete software repositories from scratch remains poorly understood. A fundamental bottleneck is the lack of verifiable and scalable evaluation: existing benchmarks either focus on patch-based editing or rely on human or LLM-based judgments, which introduce bias and limit reproducibility. In this work, we present RepoZero, the first benchmark that enables fully automated, execution-based verification of repository-level generation from scratch. Our key idea is to reformulate generation as repository reproduction: given only API specifications, an agent must re-implement an entire repository such that its behavior matches the original implementation. This design allows for strict black-box validation via output equivalence, while naturally supporting large-scale construction by reusing existing open-source repositories. To further mitigate data leakage and shortcut solutions, we introduce cross-language constraints and a sandboxed evaluation protocol. Building on this benchmark, we propose an Agentic Code-Test Evolution (ACE) framework that performs iterative test generation and error-driven refinement, enabling effective test-time scaling for repository-level synthesis. Extensive experiments across multiple state-of-the-art LLMs and agent frameworks reveal that even the strongest LLM agents achieve only limited pass rates (30\% - 55\%), exposing a substantial gap between current capabilities and real-world software development requirements. Our results establish RepoZero as a challenging, scalable, and reliable testbed for end-to-end code generation, and highlight self-verification via test generation as a critical direction for advancing LLM-based coding agents.

  • 10 authors
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May 19

ContextEvolve: Multi-Agent Context Compression for Systems Code Optimization

Large language models are transforming systems research by automating the discovery of performance-critical algorithms for computer systems. Despite plausible codes generated by LLMs, producing solutions that meet the stringent correctness and performance requirements of systems demands iterative optimization. Test-time reinforcement learning offers high search efficiency but requires parameter updates infeasible under API-only access, while existing training-free evolutionary methods suffer from inefficient context utilization and undirected search. We introduce ContextEvolve, a multi-agent framework that achieves RL-level search efficiency under strict parameter-blind constraints by decomposing optimization context into three orthogonal dimensions: a Summarizer Agent condenses semantic state via code-to-language abstraction, a Navigator Agent distills optimization direction from trajectory analysis, and a Sampler Agent curates experience distribution through prioritized exemplar retrieval. This orchestration forms a functional isomorphism with RL-mapping to state representation, policy gradient, and experience replay-enabling principled optimization in a textual latent space. On the ADRS benchmark, ContextEvolve outperforms state-of-the-art baselines by 33.3% while reducing token consumption by 29.0%. Codes for our work are released at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/ContextEvolve-ACC

  • 3 authors
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Feb 1

Barbarians at the Gate: How AI is Upending Systems Research

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is starting to transform the research process as we know it by automating the discovery of new solutions. Given a task, the typical AI-driven approach is (i) to generate a set of diverse solutions, and then (ii) to verify these solutions and select one that solves the problem. Crucially, this approach assumes the existence of a reliable verifier, i.e., one that can accurately determine whether a solution solves the given problem. We argue that systems research, long focused on designing and evaluating new performance-oriented algorithms, is particularly well-suited for AI-driven solution discovery. This is because system performance problems naturally admit reliable verifiers: solutions are typically implemented in real systems or simulators, and verification reduces to running these software artifacts against predefined workloads and measuring performance. We term this approach as AI-Driven Research for Systems (ADRS), which iteratively generates, evaluates, and refines solutions. Using penEvolve, an existing open-source ADRS instance, we present case studies across diverse domains, including load balancing for multi-region cloud scheduling, Mixture-of-Experts inference, LLM-based SQL queries, and transaction scheduling. In multiple instances, ADRS discovers algorithms that outperform state-of-the-art human designs (e.g., achieving up to 5.0x runtime improvements or 50% cost reductions). We distill best practices for guiding algorithm evolution, from prompt design to evaluator construction, for existing frameworks. We then discuss the broader implications for the systems community: as AI assumes a central role in algorithm design, we argue that human researchers will increasingly focus on problem formulation and strategic guidance. Our results highlight both the disruptive potential and the urgent need to adapt systems research practices in the age of AI.

  • 17 authors
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Oct 7, 2025 1

SlopCodeBench: Benchmarking How Coding Agents Degrade Over Long-Horizon Iterative Tasks

Software development is iterative, yet agentic coding benchmarks overwhelmingly evaluate single-shot solutions against complete specifications. Code can pass the test suite but become progressively harder to extend. Recent iterative benchmarks attempt to close this gap, but constrain the agent's design decisions too tightly to faithfully measure how code quality shapes future extensions. We introduce SlopCodeBench, a language-agnostic benchmark comprising 20 problems and 93 checkpoints, in which agents repeatedly extend their own prior solutions under evolving specifications that force architectural decisions without prescribing internal structure. We track two trajectory-level quality signals: verbosity, the fraction of redundant or duplicated code, and structural erosion, the share of complexity mass concentrated in high-complexity functions. No agent solves any problem end-to-end across 11 models; the highest checkpoint solve rate is 17.2%. Quality degrades steadily: erosion rises in 80% of trajectories and verbosity in 89.8%. Against 48 open-source Python repositories, agent code is 2.2x more verbose and markedly more eroded. Tracking 20 of those repositories over time shows that human code stays flat, while agent code deteriorates with each iteration. A prompt-intervention study shows that initial quality can be improved, but it does not halt degradation. These results demonstrate that pass-rate benchmarks systematically undermeasure extension robustness, and that current agents lack the design discipline iterative software development demands.

EVOREFUSE: Evolutionary Prompt Optimization for Evaluation and Mitigation of LLM Over-Refusal to Pseudo-Malicious Instructions

Large language models (LLMs) frequently refuse to respond to pseudo-malicious instructions: semantically harmless input queries triggering unnecessary LLM refusals due to conservative safety alignment, significantly impairing user experience. Collecting such instructions is crucial for evaluating and mitigating over-refusals, but existing instruction curation methods, like manual creation or instruction rewriting, either lack scalability or fail to produce sufficiently diverse and effective refusal-inducing prompts. To address these limitations, we introduce EVOREFUSE, a prompt optimization approach that generates diverse pseudo-malicious instructions consistently eliciting confident refusals across LLMs. EVOREFUSE employs an evolutionary algorithm exploring the instruction space in more diverse directions than existing methods via mutation strategies and recombination, and iteratively evolves seed instructions to maximize evidence lower bound on LLM refusal probability. Using EVOREFUSE, we create two novel datasets: EVOREFUSE-TEST, a benchmark of 582 pseudo-malicious instructions that outperforms the next-best benchmark with 140.41% higher average refusal triggering rate across 9 LLMs, 34.86% greater lexical diversity, and 40.03% improved LLM response confidence scores; and EVOREFUSE-ALIGN, which provides 3,000 pseudo-malicious instructions with responses for supervised and preference-based alignment training. LLAMA3.1-8B-INSTRUCT supervisedly fine-tuned on EVOREFUSE-ALIGN achieves up to 14.31% fewer over-refusals than models trained on the second-best alignment dataset, without compromising safety. Our analysis with EVOREFUSE-TEST reveals models trigger over-refusals by overly focusing on sensitive keywords while ignoring broader context.

  • 9 authors
·
May 29, 2025 2

Self-Evolving Recommendation System: End-To-End Autonomous Model Optimization With LLM Agents

Optimizing large-scale machine learning systems, such as recommendation models for global video platforms, requires navigating a massive hyperparameter search space and, more critically, designing sophisticated optimizers, architectures, and reward functions to capture nuanced user behaviors. Achieving substantial improvements in these areas is a non-trivial task, traditionally relying on extensive manual iterations to test new hypotheses. We propose a self-evolving system that leverages Large Language Models (LLMs), specifically those from Google's Gemini family, to autonomously generate, train, and deploy high-performing, complex model changes within an end-to-end automated workflow. The self-evolving system is comprised of an Offline Agent (Inner Loop) that performs high-throughput hypothesis generation using proxy metrics, and an Online Agent (Outer Loop) that validates candidates against delayed north star business metrics in live production. Our agents act as specialized Machine Learning Engineers (MLEs): they exhibit deep reasoning capabilities, discovering novel improvements in optimization algorithms and model architecture, and formulating innovative reward functions that target long-term user engagement. The effectiveness of this approach is demonstrated through several successful production launches at YouTube, confirming that autonomous, LLM-driven evolution can surpass traditional engineering workflows in both development velocity and model performance.

  • 5 authors
·
Feb 10

Leveraging LLMs to support co-evolution between definitions and instances of textual DSLs

Software languages evolve over time for various reasons, such as the addition of new features. When the language's grammar definition evolves, textual instances that originally conformed to the grammar become outdated. For DSLs in a model-driven engineering context, there exists a plethora of techniques to co-evolve models with the evolving metamodel. However, these techniques are not geared to support DSLs with a textual syntax -- applying them to textual language definitions and instances may lead to the loss of information from the original instances, such as comments and layout information, which are valuable for software comprehension and maintenance. This study explores the potential of Large Language Model (LLM)-based solutions in achieving grammar and instance co-evolution, with attention to their ability to preserve auxiliary information when directly processing textual instances. By applying two advanced language models, Claude-3.5 and GPT-4o, and conducting experiments across seven case languages, we evaluated the feasibility and limitations of this approach. Our results indicate a good ability of the considered LLMs for migrating textual instances in small-scale cases with limited instance size, which are representative of a subset of cases encountered in practice. In addition, we observe significant challenges with the scalability of LLM-based solutions to larger instances, leading to insights that are useful for informing future research.

  • 3 authors
·
Dec 7, 2025

Evolving-RL: End-to-End Optimization of Experience-Driven Self-Evolving Capability within Agents

Experience-driven self-evolving agents aim to overcome the static nature of large language models by distilling reusable experience from past interactions, thus enabling adaptation to novel tasks at deployment time. This process places substantial demands on the foundation model's capacities for abstraction, generalization, and in-context learning. However, most existing studies focus primarily on system-level design choices, such as how experience is represented and managed, neglecting the inherent capabilities of the underlying model. While some recent works have started to optimize the experience utilization stage via reinforcement learning, they still fail to treat self-evolution as a unified process to be jointly optimized. To this end, we propose Evolving-RL, an efficient algorithmic framework that jointly improves the experience extraction and utilization capabilities required for self-evolution. Specifically, we center the learning process on experience extraction and evaluation, using the two supervisory signals derived from evaluation to optimize the extractor and solver separately and thus enable their coordinated co-evolution. Experiments on ALFWorld and Mind2Web show that Evolving-RL effectively enhances LLMs' ability to extract and reuse experience, leading to strong performance gains on out-of-distribution tasks (up to 98.7% relative improvement over the GRPO baseline on ALFWorld unseen tasks and 35.8% on Mind2Web), and these gains are fully unlocked only through the coordinated co-evolution of experience extraction and utilization. Furthermore, Evolving-RL inherently functions as an experience-augmented RL algorithm. By internalizing reusable experience patterns directly into model parameters, it achieves remarkable performance gains over standard baselines on both seen and unseen tasks, even in the absence of test-time experience accumulation.

  • 7 authors
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May 10

SEVerA: Verified Synthesis of Self-Evolving Agents

Recent advances have shown the effectiveness of self-evolving LLM agents on tasks such as program repair and scientific discovery. In this paradigm, a planner LLM synthesizes an agent program that invokes parametric models, including LLMs, which are then tuned per task to improve performance. However, existing self-evolving agent frameworks provide no formal guarantees of safety or correctness. Because such programs are often executed autonomously on unseen inputs, this lack of guarantees raises reliability and security concerns. We formulate agentic code generation as a constrained learning problem, combining hard formal specifications with soft objectives capturing task utility. We introduce Formally Guarded Generative Models (FGGM), which allow the planner LLM to specify a formal output contract for each generative model call using first-order logic. Each FGGM call wraps the underlying model in a rejection sampler with a verified fallback, ensuring every returned output satisfies the contract for any input and parameter setting. Building on FGGM, we present SEVerA (Self-Evolving Verified Agents), a three-stage framework: Search synthesizes candidate parametric programs containing FGGM calls; Verification proves correctness with respect to hard constraints for all parameter values, reducing the problem to unconstrained learning; and Learning applies scalable gradient-based optimization, including GRPO-style fine-tuning, to improve the soft objective while preserving correctness. We evaluate SEVerA on Dafny program verification, symbolic math synthesis, and policy-compliant agentic tool use (τ^2-bench). Across tasks, SEVerA achieves zero constraint violations while improving performance over unconstrained and SOTA baselines, showing that formal behavioral constraints not only guarantee correctness but also steer synthesis toward higher-quality agents.

  • 3 authors
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Mar 25 3

LoongFlow: Directed Evolutionary Search via a Cognitive Plan-Execute-Summarize Paradigm

The transition from static Large Language Models (LLMs) to self-improving agents is hindered by the lack of structured reasoning in traditional evolutionary approaches. Existing methods often struggle with premature convergence and inefficient exploration in high-dimensional code spaces. To address these challenges, we introduce LoongFlow, a self-evolving agent framework that achieves state-of-the-art solution quality with significantly reduced computational costs. Unlike "blind" mutation operators, LoongFlow integrates LLMs into a cognitive "Plan-Execute-Summarize" (PES) paradigm, effectively mapping the evolutionary search to a reasoning-heavy process. To sustain long-term architectural coherence, we incorporate a hybrid evolutionary memory system. By synergizing Multi-Island models with MAP-Elites and adaptive Boltzmann selection, this system theoretically balances the exploration-exploitation trade-off, maintaining diverse behavioral niches to prevent optimization stagnation. We instantiate LoongFlow with a General Agent for algorithmic discovery and an ML Agent for pipeline optimization. Extensive evaluations on the AlphaEvolve benchmark and Kaggle competitions demonstrate that LoongFlow outperforms leading baselines (e.g., OpenEvolve, ShinkaEvolve) by up to 60% in evolutionary efficiency while discovering superior solutions. LoongFlow marks a substantial step forward in autonomous scientific discovery, enabling the generation of expert-level solutions with reduced computational overhead.

baidu BAIDU
·
Dec 30, 2025 2

Learning Performance-Improving Code Edits

The waning of Moore's Law has shifted the focus of the tech industry towards alternative methods for continued performance gains. While optimizing compilers are a standard tool to help increase program efficiency, programmers continue to shoulder much responsibility in crafting and refactoring code with better performance characteristics. In this paper, we investigate the ability of large language models (LLMs) to suggest functionally correct, performance improving code edits. We hypothesize that language models can suggest such edits in ways that would be impractical for static analysis alone. We investigate these questions by curating a large-scale dataset of Performance-Improving Edits, PIE. PIE contains trajectories of programs, where a programmer begins with an initial, slower version and iteratively makes changes to improve the program's performance. We use PIE to evaluate and improve the capacity of large language models. Specifically, use examples from PIE to fine-tune multiple variants of CODEGEN, a billion-scale Transformer-decoder model. Additionally, we use examples from PIE to prompt OpenAI's CODEX using a few-shot prompting. By leveraging PIE, we find that both CODEX and CODEGEN can generate performance-improving edits, with speedups of more than 2.5x for over 25% of the programs, for C++ and Python, even after the C++ programs were compiled using the O3 optimization level. Crucially, we show that PIE allows CODEGEN, an open-sourced and 10x smaller model than CODEX, to match the performance of CODEX on this challenging task. Overall, this work opens new doors for creating systems and methods that can help programmers write efficient code.

  • 8 authors
·
Feb 15, 2023