Pith. sign in

REVIEW 7 cited by

Self-Taught Optimizer (STOP): Recursively Self-Improving Code Generation

Not yet reviewed by Pith; the record is open.

This paper has not been read by Pith yet. Machine review is queued; the pith claim, tier, and objections will appear here once it completes.

SPECIMEN: schema-true, not a live event

T0 review · schema-true

One-sentence machine reading of the paper's core claim.

pith:XXXXXXXX · record.json · timestamp

arxiv 2310.02304 v3 pith:OACF7TTE submitted 2023-10-03 cs.CL cs.AIcs.LGstat.ML

Self-Taught Optimizer (STOP): Recursively Self-Improving Code Generation

classification cs.CL cs.AIcs.LGstat.ML
keywords languageimproveritselfprogramcodeimprovescaffoldingseed
verification ladder T0 review T1 audit T2 compute T3 formal T4 reserved
0 comments
read the original abstract

Several recent advances in AI systems solve problems by providing a "scaffolding" program that structures multiple calls to language models (LMs) to generate better outputs. A scaffolding program is written in a programming language such as Python. In this work, we use a language-model-infused scaffolding program to improve itself. We start with a seed "improver" that improves an input program according to a given utility function by querying an LM several times and returning the best solution. We then run this seed improver to improve itself. Across a small set of downstream tasks, the resulting improved improver generates programs with significantly better performance than its seed improver. A variety of self-improvement strategies are proposed by the language model, including beam search, genetic algorithms, and simulated annealing. Since the language models themselves are not altered, this is not full recursive self-improvement. Nonetheless, it demonstrates that a modern language model, GPT-4 in our experiments, is capable of writing code that can call itself to improve itself. We consider concerns around the development of self-improving technologies and evaluate the frequency with which the generated code bypasses a sandbox.

discussion (0)

Sign in with ORCID, Apple, or X to comment. Anyone can read and Pith papers without signing in.

Forward citations

Cited by 7 Pith papers

Reviewed papers in the Pith corpus that reference this work. Sorted by Pith novelty score.

  1. Self-Harness: Harnesses That Improve Themselves

    cs.CL 2026-06 unverdicted novelty 7.0

    Self-Harness lets LLM agents autonomously refine their interaction harnesses through weakness mining, proposal generation, and validation, raising held-out pass rates on Terminal-Bench-2.0 from 40.5% to 61.9%, 23.8% t...

  2. Self-Modifying Lean Proof Agents with Verifier-Grounded Benchmark Coevolution

    cs.AI 2026-07 conditional novelty 6.0

    A verifier-grounded self-evolving Lean proof agent with a champion-driven, self-hardening benchmark reached 45.1% held-out miniF2F solve rate versus 32.0% for a fixed-benchmark baseline.

  3. A Vocabulary for Multi-Agent Automated Research Systems

    cs.AI 2026-07 accept novelty 6.0

    A new 8-part tuple formally describes any multi-agent research automation system so that design choices can be isolated and compared.

  4. TTHE: Test-Time Harness Evolution

    cs.SE 2026-07 conditional novelty 6.0

    An LLM agent can improve itself at test time by rewriting its surrounding executable harness from unlabeled traces, using only proxy signals and a frozen model.

  5. The Red Queen G\"odel Machine: Co-Evolving Agents and Their Evaluators

    cs.LG 2026-06 unverdicted novelty 6.0

    The Red Queen Gödel Machine organizes recursive self-improvement into epochs with fixed intra-epoch evaluation while allowing utility evolution at boundaries, yielding reported gains on coding, paper writing, and proo...

  6. The Red Queen G\"odel Machine: Co-Evolving Agents and Their Evaluators

    cs.LG 2026-06 unverdicted novelty 5.0

    RQGM enables co-evolution of agents and evaluators across epochs with non-stationary utilities, reporting gains in coding pass rates, paper acceptance, and proof grading over prior self-improving agents.

  7. Marginal Advantage Accumulation for Memory-Driven Agent Self-Evolution

    cs.LG 2026-06 unverdicted novelty 5.0

    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-...