Presents a query-complexity framework for genetic algorithms with guided operators and shows necessity of multiple operators and tight bounds for diversity in solution pools.
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Promptbreeder: Self-Referential Self-Improvement Via Prompt Evolution
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abstract
Popular prompt strategies like Chain-of-Thought Prompting can dramatically improve the reasoning abilities of Large Language Models (LLMs) in various domains. However, such hand-crafted prompt-strategies are often sub-optimal. In this paper, we present Promptbreeder, a general-purpose self-referential self-improvement mechanism that evolves and adapts prompts for a given domain. Driven by an LLM, Promptbreeder mutates a population of task-prompts, and subsequently evaluates them for fitness on a training set. Crucially, the mutation of these task-prompts is governed by mutation-prompts that the LLM generates and improves throughout evolution in a self-referential way. That is, Promptbreeder is not just improving task-prompts, but it is also improving the mutationprompts that improve these task-prompts. Promptbreeder outperforms state-of-the-art prompt strategies such as Chain-of-Thought and Plan-and-Solve Prompting on commonly used arithmetic and commonsense reasoning benchmarks. Furthermore, Promptbreeder is able to evolve intricate task-prompts for the challenging problem of hate speech classification.
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PACE is a training-free anytime-valid commit gate using testing-by-betting e-processes that controls per-candidate false-commit probability for self-evolving agents and reduces spurious edits compared to greedy acceptance.
A policy network learns to choose unmasking order in masked diffusion by reweighting the loss, outperforming random and heuristic baselines on ordering-sensitive tasks.
Proposes LDB-DF and NDB-DF algorithms for contextual dueling bandits with delayed feedback using an IPW estimator in the loss, with O(d sqrt(T)) regret for the linear case and sub-linear guarantees for the neural case.
Life-Harness evolves reusable interventions from training trajectories to enhance frozen LLM agents on unseen tasks across seven deterministic environments, yielding 88.5% average relative improvement in 116 of 126 model-environment settings.
Residual skill optimization creates complementary Text-to-SQL agents by training each new skill on prior ensemble failures, yielding accuracy gains on Spider2-Lite and transfer to other dialects and tasks.
TextReg mitigates prompt distributional overfitting via regularized text-space optimization, reporting up to +16.5% OOD accuracy gains over prior methods on reasoning benchmarks.
ReElicit uses LLMs to elicit adaptive feature embeddings for Gaussian process Bayesian optimization of system prompts under aggregate-only feedback, outperforming baselines across ten tasks with a 30-evaluation budget.
LLM societies in Nomic show non-monotonic collective adaptation peaking at mid-scales, with smaller models rule-inert and larger ones restrictive.
PRISM automates continuous prompt creation, simulation-based testing, diagnosis, and repair for enterprise LLM agents, cutting authoring time to under 30 minutes while reaching 99% reliability and catching drift within 24 hours.
Extends PAC machine teaching to handle deductive errors by requiring teachers to select sets that lead to approximately correct hypotheses with high probability despite learner mistakes, with complexity results and LLM experiments.
Fast-Slow Training uses context optimization as fast weights alongside parameter updates as slow weights to achieve up to 3x better sample efficiency, higher performance, and less catastrophic forgetting than standard RL in continual LLM learning.
TSCG compiles JSON tool schemas into token-efficient structured text, raising tool-use accuracy for small LLMs from 0% to 84.4% on benchmarks while cutting tokens by 52-57%.
PUDA enables effective promotion of unpopular target items in black-box LLM sequential recommenders by using evolutionary LLM refinement to infer hidden prompts, training a surrogate model, and combining adversarial text revision with surrogate-generated poisoning sequences.
RAG-HAR combines retrieval-augmented generation with LLMs to deliver state-of-the-art human activity recognition across six benchmarks without any model training or fine-tuning.
AlphaEvolve is an LLM-orchestrated evolutionary coding agent that discovered a 4x4 complex matrix multiplication algorithm using 48 scalar multiplications, the first improvement over Strassen's algorithm in 56 years, plus optimizations for Google data centers and hardware.
Large language models can optimize by being prompted with histories of past solutions and scores to propose better ones, producing prompts that raise accuracy up to 8% on GSM8K and 50% on Big-Bench Hard over human-designed baselines.
AutoMem automates memory structure revision and proficiency training in LLMs, delivering 2x-4x performance gains on long-horizon games without altering task-action behavior.
An agentic weak–strong Self-Instruct loop, optionally meta-optimized, produces synthetic data that trains small models better than standard CoT Self-Instruct across three domains.
Proposes compiling preference pairs into readable natural-language specifications for inference-time LLM alignment, claiming outperformance over DPO on dense-preference domains.
A new benchmark study finds that prompt optimization can deliver significant gains in multi-agent LLM systems but its effectiveness varies strongly with task, workflow, communication protocol, and team size.
RSEA adds a strict held-out keep-better gate to recursive self-evolution of agent artifacts, yielding monotone-safe gains or parity with the base ReAct agent on ALFWorld, GAIA, τ-bench, and WebShop.
BenchEvolver evolves coding problem solutions to generate harder, valid tasks, producing LiveCodeBench-Plus where frontier models score 27.5-62.6% and enabling RL gains on held-out tests.
MemPro evolves the entire MCR pipeline as runnable programs via failure-guided refinement on a version tree and outperforms static baselines on LongMemEval, LoCoMo, HotpotQA, and NarrativeQA.
citing papers explorer
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Mathematical perspective on genetic algorithms with optimization guided operators
Presents a query-complexity framework for genetic algorithms with guided operators and shows necessity of multiple operators and tight bounds for diversity in solution pools.
-
PACE: Anytime-Valid Acceptance Tests for Self-Evolving Agents
PACE is a training-free anytime-valid commit gate using testing-by-betting e-processes that controls per-candidate false-commit probability for self-evolving agents and reduces spurious edits compared to greedy acceptance.
-
Adaptive Order Policies for Masked Diffusion
A policy network learns to choose unmasking order in masked diffusion by reweighting the loss, outperforming random and heuristic baselines on ordering-sensitive tasks.
-
Linear and Neural Dueling Bandits with Delayed Feedback
Proposes LDB-DF and NDB-DF algorithms for contextual dueling bandits with delayed feedback using an IPW estimator in the loss, with O(d sqrt(T)) regret for the linear case and sub-linear guarantees for the neural case.
-
Adapting the Interface, Not the Model: Runtime Harness Adaptation for Deterministic LLM Agents
Life-Harness evolves reusable interventions from training trajectories to enhance frozen LLM agents on unseen tasks across seven deterministic environments, yielding 88.5% average relative improvement in 116 of 126 model-environment settings.
-
Residual Skill Optimization for Text-to-SQL Ensembles
Residual skill optimization creates complementary Text-to-SQL agents by training each new skill on prior ensemble failures, yielding accuracy gains on Spider2-Lite and transfer to other dialects and tasks.
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TextReg: Mitigating Prompt Distributional Overfitting via Regularized Text-Space Optimization
TextReg mitigates prompt distributional overfitting via regularized text-space optimization, reporting up to +16.5% OOD accuracy gains over prior methods on reasoning benchmarks.
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Embedding by Elicitation: Dynamic Representations for Bayesian Optimization of System Prompts
ReElicit uses LLMs to elicit adaptive feature embeddings for Gaussian process Bayesian optimization of system prompts under aggregate-only feedback, outperforming baselines across ten tasks with a 30-evaluation budget.
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Scale-Dependent Collective Adaptation in Self-Amending LLM Societies: A Cross-Family Study of Emergent Governance
LLM societies in Nomic show non-monotonic collective adaptation peaking at mid-scales, with smaller models rule-inert and larger ones restrictive.
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PRISM: Prompt Reliability via Iterative Simulation and Monitoring for Enterprise Conversational AI
PRISM automates continuous prompt creation, simulation-based testing, diagnosis, and repair for enterprise LLM agents, cutting authoring time to under 30 minutes while reaching 99% reliability and catching drift within 24 hours.
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Teaching and Learning under Deductive Errors
Extends PAC machine teaching to handle deductive errors by requiring teachers to select sets that lead to approximately correct hypotheses with high probability despite learner mistakes, with complexity results and LLM experiments.
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Learning, Fast and Slow: Towards LLMs That Adapt Continually
Fast-Slow Training uses context optimization as fast weights alongside parameter updates as slow weights to achieve up to 3x better sample efficiency, higher performance, and less catastrophic forgetting than standard RL in continual LLM learning.
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TSCG: Deterministic Tool-Schema Compilation for Agentic LLM Deployments
TSCG compiles JSON tool schemas into token-efficient structured text, raising tool-use accuracy for small LLMs from 0% to 84.4% on benchmarks while cutting tokens by 52-57%.
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Prompt-Unknown Promotion Attacks against LLM-based Sequential Recommender Systems
PUDA enables effective promotion of unpopular target items in black-box LLM sequential recommenders by using evolutionary LLM refinement to infer hidden prompts, training a surrogate model, and combining adversarial text revision with surrogate-generated poisoning sequences.
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RAG-HAR: Retrieval Augmented Generation-based Human Activity Recognition
RAG-HAR combines retrieval-augmented generation with LLMs to deliver state-of-the-art human activity recognition across six benchmarks without any model training or fine-tuning.
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AlphaEvolve: A coding agent for scientific and algorithmic discovery
AlphaEvolve is an LLM-orchestrated evolutionary coding agent that discovered a 4x4 complex matrix multiplication algorithm using 48 scalar multiplications, the first improvement over Strassen's algorithm in 56 years, plus optimizations for Google data centers and hardware.
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Large Language Models as Optimizers
Large language models can optimize by being prompted with histories of past solutions and scores to propose better ones, producing prompts that raise accuracy up to 8% on GSM8K and 50% on Big-Bench Hard over human-designed baselines.
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AutoMem: Automated Learning of Memory as a Cognitive Skill
AutoMem automates memory structure revision and proficiency training in LLMs, delivering 2x-4x performance gains on long-horizon games without altering task-action behavior.
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Autodata: An agentic data scientist to create high quality synthetic data
An agentic weak–strong Self-Instruct loop, optionally meta-optimized, produces synthetic data that trains small models better than standard CoT Self-Instruct across three domains.
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Towards Spec Learning: Inference-Time Alignment from Preference Pairs
Proposes compiling preference pairs into readable natural-language specifications for inference-time LLM alignment, claiming outperformance over DPO on dense-preference domains.
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MAS-PromptBench: When Does Prompt Optimization Improve Multi-Agent LLM Systems?
A new benchmark study finds that prompt optimization can deliver significant gains in multi-agent LLM systems but its effectiveness varies strongly with task, workflow, communication protocol, and team size.
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Recursive Self-Evolving Agents via Held-Out Selection
RSEA adds a strict held-out keep-better gate to recursive self-evolution of agent artifacts, yielding monotone-safe gains or parity with the base ReAct agent on ALFWorld, GAIA, τ-bench, and WebShop.
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BenchEvolver: Frontier Task Synthesis via Solution-Centric Evolution
BenchEvolver evolves coding problem solutions to generate harder, valid tasks, producing LiveCodeBench-Plus where frontier models score 27.5-62.6% and enabling RL gains on held-out tests.
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MemPro: Agentic Memory Systems as Evolvable Programs
MemPro evolves the entire MCR pipeline as runnable programs via failure-guided refinement on a version tree and outperforms static baselines on LongMemEval, LoCoMo, HotpotQA, and NarrativeQA.
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Evolving and Detecting Multi-Turn Deception using Geometric Signatures
Multi-objective genetic prompt optimization creates multi-turn deceptive datasets validated by humans, then detected with 0.89 recall using angular coverage, distance ratio, and linearity features in embeddings.
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Why Prompt Optimization Works, and Why It Sometimes Doesn't: A Causal-Inspired Edit-Level Analysis
Observational causal-inspired analysis finds prompt optimization failures arise from systematic interactions between edit families and task characteristics rather than random artifacts.
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optimize_anything: A Universal API for Optimizing any Text Parameter
A universal LLM optimizer for text artifacts achieves SOTA results on six tasks including tripling ARC-AGI accuracy and cutting cloud costs by 40% via cross-task transfer and side information.
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Harnesses for Inference-Time Alignment over Execution Trajectories
Partial harnesses for LLM agents, specifying only initial execution steps, achieve higher pass rates than fully decomposed workflows, as analyzed through trajectory alignment and validated in synthetic and terminal benchmarks.
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Contexting as Recommendation: Evolutionary Collaborative Filtering for Context Engineering
NCCE reframes context engineering as instance-level recommendation via bootstrapped anchor contexts and a co-evolving neural collaborative filtering router that assigns specialized contexts per input.
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EvoMAS: Learning Execution-Time Workflows for Multi-Agent Systems
EvoMAS trains a workflow adapter with policy gradients to dynamically instantiate stage-specific multi-agent workflows from a fixed agent pool, using explicit task-state construction and terminal success signals, and outperforms static baselines on GAIA, HLE, and DeepResearcher.
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PrismaDV: Automated Task-Aware Data Unit Test Generation
PrismaDV generates task-aware data unit tests by jointly analyzing downstream code and dataset profiles, outperforming task-agnostic baselines on new benchmarks spanning 60 tasks, with SIFTA enabling automatic prompt optimization that beats hand-written prompts.
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Prompt Optimization Is a Coin Flip: Diagnosing When It Helps in Compound AI Systems
End-to-end prompt optimization in compound AI systems is no better than chance unless the task has exploitable output structure the model can produce but does not default to.
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LLM-Guided Prompt Evolution for Password Guessing
LLM-guided evolutionary prompt optimization using MAP-Elites and island models raises password cracking rates from 2.02% to 8.48% on a RockYou-derived test set across local, cloud, and ensemble LLM setups.
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Select Smarter, Not More: Prompt-Aware Evaluation Scheduling with Submodular Guarantees
POES frames prompt evaluation as online adaptive testing and uses a provably submodular objective to pick informative examples, delivering 6.2% higher average accuracy and 35-60% token savings versus naive full-set scoring.
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TurboEvolve: Towards Fast and Robust LLM-Driven Program Evolution
TurboEvolve improves LLM program evolution by running parallel islands with LLM-generated diverse candidates that carry self-assigned weights, an adaptive scheduler, and clustered seed injection to reach stronger solutions at lower evaluation budgets.
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Pioneer Agent: Continual Improvement of Small Language Models in Production
Pioneer Agent automates the full lifecycle of adapting and continually improving small language models via diagnosis-driven data synthesis and regression-constrained retraining, delivering gains of 1.6-83.8 points on benchmarks and large lifts in production-style tasks.
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ExecTune: Effective Steering of Black-Box LLMs with Guide Models
ExecTune trains guide models via acceptance sampling, supervised fine-tuning, and structure-aware RL to boost executability of strategies for black-box LLMs, yielding up to 9.2% higher accuracy and 22.4% lower cost on math and code tasks.
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Red-Teaming Vision-Language-Action Models via Quality Diversity Prompt Generation for Robust Robot Policies
Q-DIG applies quality diversity optimization with vision-language models to generate diverse adversarial instructions that reveal VLA robot failures and enable robustness improvements via fine-tuning.
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Diversifying Toxicity Search in Large Language Models Through Speciation
ToxSearch-S applies unsupervised speciation to evolutionary prompt search, maintaining capacity-limited species with exemplar leaders and species-aware selection to achieve higher peak toxicity and broader semantic coverage than standard methods.
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Contrastive Reflection for Iterative Prompt Optimization
Contrastive Reflection identifies error-anchored slices in agent traces, adds contrastive successes, and uses a Teacher LLM to generate prompt edits that are accepted only if they improve validation performance, raising HotpotQA exact-match from 51.4% to 60.4%.
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AlgoEvolve: LLM-driven Meta-evolution of Algorithmic Trading Programs
An LLM-driven evolutionary framework generates executable trading strategies as Python code and uses a meta-loop to evolve the prompts that guide synthesis.
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Marginal Advantage Accumulation for Memory-Driven Agent Self-Evolution
MAA formalizes alignability and comparability conditions and uses differential signals, EMA accumulation, and semantic identity merging to enable cross-batch operation-level evidence accumulation, outperforming batch-level baselines in 14 of 16 settings while matching online methods.
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EEVEE: Towards Test-time Prompt Learning in the Real World for Self-Improving Agents
EEVEE introduces a router-based multi-dataset test-time prompt learning framework for LLM agents that uses router-prompt co-evolution to improve robustness on heterogeneous data streams.
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Prompt Optimization for LLM Code Generation via Reinforcement Learning
A PPO agent with hybrid actions and test-driven rewards optimizes prompts for code LLMs, raising strict Pass@1 scores on MBPP+, HumanEval+, and APPS over prior methods.
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FORGE: Self-Evolving Agent Memory With No Weight Updates via Population Broadcast
FORGE is a staged population protocol that evolves prompt-injected memory (Rules, Examples, or Mixed) for ReAct agents via reflection and broadcast, yielding 1.7-7.7× gains over zero-shot and 29-72% over Reflexion on CybORG CAGE-2.
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EGL-SCA: Structural Credit Assignment for Co-Evolving Instructions and Tools in Graph Reasoning Agents
EGL-SCA co-evolves instructions and tools via structural credit assignment in graph reasoning agents and reports 92% average success on four benchmarks.
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Distributed Quality-Diversity Search for Toxicity in Large Language Models
ToxSearch-S extends evolutionary toxicity search with embedding-driven speciation and MPI distribution, matching baseline peak toxicity while showing lower search pressure and 1.8-3.2x speedups.
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Building Customer Support AI Agents at 100M-User Scale: An Evaluation-Driven Framework
An evaluation-driven framework for customer support AI agents at Nubank integrates context engineering, LLM judges, and A/B testing to deliver up to 37pp NPS gains and strong offline-online correlation across five production domains.
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A Survey of Self-Evolving Agents: What, When, How, and Where to Evolve on the Path to Artificial Super Intelligence
The paper delivers the first systematic review of self-evolving agents, structured around what components evolve, when adaptation occurs, and how it is implemented.
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Towards Large Reasoning Models: A Survey of Reinforced Reasoning with Large Language Models
The paper surveys reinforced reasoning techniques for LLMs, covering automated data construction, learning-to-reason methods, and test-time scaling as steps toward Large Reasoning Models.