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Darwin Godel Machine: Open-Ended Evolution of Self-Improving Agents

Canonical reference. 85% of citing Pith papers cite this work as background.

27 Pith papers citing it
Background 85% of classified citations
abstract

Today's AI systems have human-designed, fixed architectures and cannot autonomously and continuously improve themselves. The advance of AI could itself be automated. If done safely, that would accelerate AI development and allow us to reap its benefits much sooner. Meta-learning can automate the discovery of novel algorithms, but is limited by first-order improvements and the human design of a suitable search space. The G\"odel machine proposed a theoretical alternative: a self-improving AI that repeatedly modifies itself in a provably beneficial manner. Unfortunately, proving that most changes are net beneficial is impossible in practice. We introduce the Darwin G\"odel Machine (DGM), a self-improving system that iteratively modifies its own code (thereby also improving its ability to modify its own codebase) and empirically validates each change using coding benchmarks. Inspired by Darwinian evolution and open-endedness research, the DGM maintains an archive of generated coding agents. It grows the archive by sampling an agent from it and using a foundation model to create a new, interesting, version of the sampled agent. This open-ended exploration forms a growing tree of diverse, high-quality agents and allows the parallel exploration of many different paths through the search space. Empirically, the DGM automatically improves its coding capabilities (e.g., better code editing tools, long-context window management, peer-review mechanisms), increasing performance on SWE-bench from 20.0% to 50.0%, and on Polyglot from 14.2% to 30.7%. Furthermore, the DGM significantly outperforms baselines without self-improvement or open-ended exploration. All experiments were done with safety precautions (e.g., sandboxing, human oversight). The DGM is a significant step toward self-improving AI, capable of gathering its own stepping stones along paths that unfold into endless innovation.

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years

2026 21 2025 6

representative citing papers

Harnessing Agentic Evolution

cs.AI · 2026-05-13 · unverdicted · novelty 7.0

AEvo introduces a meta-agent that edits the evolution procedure or agent context based on accumulated state, outperforming baselines by 26% relative improvement on agentic benchmarks and achieving SOTA on open-ended tasks.

Optimizing ground state preparation protocols with autoresearch

quant-ph · 2026-04-28 · unverdicted · novelty 7.0 · 2 refs

AI coding agents evolve simple ground-state protocols into improved versions for VQE, DMRG, and AFQMC on spin models and molecules by using executable energy scores under fixed compute budgets.

Open-Ended Task Discovery via Bayesian Optimization

cs.AI · 2026-05-08 · unverdicted · novelty 6.0

Generate-Select-Refine is an open-ended Bayesian optimization method that generates tasks and concentrates evaluations on the best one with only logarithmic regret overhead relative to standard single-task optimization.

AgentGA: Evolving Code Solutions in Agent-Seed Space

cs.AI · 2026-04-16 · unverdicted · novelty 6.0 · 2 refs

AgentGA optimizes agent seeds with genetic algorithms and parent-archive inheritance to improve autonomous code generation, beating a baseline on 15 of 16 Kaggle competitions.

AI-Driven Research for Databases

cs.DB · 2026-04-08 · unverdicted · novelty 6.0

Co-evolving LLM-generated solutions with their evaluators enables discovery of novel database algorithms that outperform state-of-the-art baselines, including a query rewrite policy with up to 6.8x lower latency.

Memory in the Age of AI Agents

cs.CL · 2025-12-15 · unverdicted · novelty 6.0

The paper maps agent memory research via three forms (token-level, parametric, latent), three functions (factual, experiential, working), and dynamics of formation/evolution/retrieval, plus benchmarks and future directions.

Differentiable Evolutionary Reinforcement Learning

cs.AI · 2025-12-15 · unverdicted · novelty 6.0

DERL is a differentiable bi-level method that evolves optimal reward structures for RL policies by composing atomic primitives and using meta-gradients from validation performance.

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

cs.CL · 2025-09-17 · unverdicted · novelty 6.0

ShinkaEvolve improves sample efficiency in LLM-driven program evolution via parent sampling, code novelty rejection-sampling, and bandit LLM ensemble selection, achieving new SOTA circle packing with 150 samples and gains on math reasoning and competitive programming tasks.

Evolutionary Ensemble of Agents

cs.NE · 2026-05-09 · unverdicted · novelty 5.0 · 2 refs

EvE co-evolves code solvers and guidance states via synchronous races and Elo updates, discovering a rescale-then-interpolate mechanism that enables example-count generalization in ICON.

AI for Auto-Research: Roadmap & User Guide

cs.AI · 2026-05-18 · unverdicted · novelty 4.0

The paper delivers a stage-by-stage roadmap for AI in research, showing reliable assistance in retrieval and tool tasks but fragility in novelty and judgment, advocating human-governed collaboration.

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Showing 27 of 27 citing papers.