What if letting an agent evolve its own workflow just meant it got better at gaming the test? This paper tackles exactly that overfitting problem.
Title: RRSI: Regularized Recursive Self-Improvement of Agent Harnesses
URL:
❓ What's a harness?
It's everything wrapped around the frozen LLM: prompts, control flow, tooling, memory, context management. The same model can perform very differently depending on this design.
❓ Why does self-improving it overfit?
Three failure modes show up: fitting too tightly to the evolve-set benchmark, chasing noise, and letting complexity pile up unchecked.
💡 How does RRSI fix it?
It applies classic ML regularization (L0, L1, L2) to harness evolution: an annealed edit budget limits changes per round, benchmark-specific proposals get screened out at selection, and unproductive components get pruned.
💡 What's the payoff?
Across 8 benchmarks, RRSI beats baselines by up to 22.9% on unseen tasks, while using 30% fewer tokens.
It feels like a genuinely grounded step toward agents that can safely improve their own workflow in production.
#
AIAgents# #
SelfImprovement#