Recursive Self-Evolving Agents via Held-Out Selection
Researchers introduce RSEA, a recursive self-evolving agent that improves LLM agents by evolving a compact natural-language state without weight updates. Using a strict held-out selection gate, RSEA outperforms baselines on some benchmarks while maintaining safety against performance collapse. The study finds no universally best artifact and warns against unguarded context evolution.
[2606.28374] Recursive Self-Evolving Agents via Held-Out Selection
[Submitted on 17 Jun 2026]
Title:Recursive Self-Evolving Agents via Held-Out Selection
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Abstract:LLM agents are increasingly improved without weight updates by evolving a natural-language artifact, such as reflections, workflows, playbooks, cheatsheets, or optimized prompts, that conditions a frozen policy. Such methods are typically reported as wins on the single benchmark where they help. We study them apples-to-apples and surface a sharper picture. We introduce RSEA, a Recursive Self-Evolving Agent that carries a compact three-layer natural-language state: an imperative strategy, reusable skills, and a procedural playbook. Across generations, RSEA rewrites all three layers from its own trajectories and commits a candidate only if it does not regress on a disjoint held-out split, using a strict keep-better gate.
Across four diverse benchmarks, ALFWorld, GAIA, (\tau)-bench, and WebShop, and six faithful baselines, ReAct, Reflexion, GEPA, AWM, ACE, and Dynamic Cheatsheet, all evaluated on one shared local backbone, we find three main results. First, no artifact universally wins. RSEA is the strongest single-pass method on ALFWorld, reaching 69.3% compared with 64.6% for ReAct (McNemar (p=0.015)), and reaches 79.4% with retry, the best overall result. However, concrete-workflow induction, represented by AWM, is best on the strong-backbone tool-use tasks. Second, unguarded context evolution is high-variance and unsafe. Dynamic Cheatsheet, which curates context online without a held-out gate, is near-best on ALFWorld at 70.7%, yet collapses on WebShop, with a score of 0.14 compared with 0.43 for ReAct. Third, RSEA's strict held-out selection is what makes recursive self-evolution monotone-safe: it never significantly underperforms the base agent on any benchmark and falls back to vanilla ReAct when evolved context would hurt.
Subjects:
Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI)
Cite as: arXiv:2606.28374 [cs.AI]
(or arXiv:2606.28374v1 [cs.AI] for this version)
https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2606.28374
arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite
Submission history
From: Michael Nguyen [view email] [v1] Wed, 17 Jun 2026 14:53:36 UTC (257 KB)
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