Fields · AI · updated 1h ago

Recursive self improvement

Found by the topic model: recursive self improvement, teacher policy distillation, multi agent debate.

208papers this week−45.3% vs last week

All papers · 2.7k With code · 207

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1.7k papers this month

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Recursive self improvement · ByteTrail

Fields · AI · updated 1h ago

Recursive self improvement

Found by the topic model: recursive self improvement, teacher policy distillation, multi agent debate.

208papers this week−45.3% vs last week

All papers · 2.7k With code · 207

Newest Most relevant

1.7k papers this month

Recent papers

All papers in Research

arXiv cs.AIOct 26
MAREval: A Multi-Agent Framework for Evaluating Natural Language Recommendation Explanations
Reza Yousefi Maragheh, Jayesh Uddhav Kudase, Aysenur Inan, Ramin Giahi, Kai Zhao +5
Evaluating natural language explanations in recommender systems is essential for fostering user trust, transparency, and engagement. However, existing evaluation approaches like human evaluations, while accurate, are resource-intensive and impractical at the scale required by modern recommendation platforms. Also, automated methods using single-agent LLMs suffer from prompt sensitivity and inconsistent outputs. To address these challenges, we propose MAREval, a structured multi-agent framework for evaluating recommendation explanations using large language models. MAREval orchestrates (i) a planner agent that uses a novel Chain of Debate (CoD) prompting strategy to coordinate agent roles and enforce logically consistent evaluation plans; (ii) a moderator agent that regulates discussions by mitigating prompt drift; and (iii) an arbitrator agent that aggregates outputs from multiple evaluation rounds and (iv) a Monte Carlo sampling method, improving robustness and alignment with human judgment. We conduct comprehensive evaluations on both public (TopicalChat) and proprietary recommendation datasets, demonstrating that MAREval outperforms state-of-the-art baselines. Comprehensive…
PDF arXiv
arXiv cs.LGOct 26
Base Models Can Detect Hidden Intentions that Prompted Classifiers Miss
Oz Amram
The Persona Selection Model (PSM) posits that post-training selects a persona the model learned during pre-training. Work on subliminal learning has shown that models can impart covert signals (like "love of owls") into semantically unrelated outputs like strings of numbers, and that students trained on these outputs inherit those traits. In this work I show that by evaluating the likelihood of such outputs under the base pre-trained model with an appropriate header, a method I call persona-header likelihood evaluation (PHLE), one can decode these subliminal signals and classify between them. For example, PHLE distinguishes number sequences generated by a post-trained model prompted with "You love owls" from those prompted with "You love eagles", and distinguishes answers from a model with a secret desire to harm the user, filtered to remove any noticeable misalignment, from those of a model with no system prompt. In both cases prompted classifiers, including the generating model itself, remain near chance. The signal partially persists across model families, with the Qwen base model reading signals generated by Olmo and vice versa. This is evidence for a non-trivial prediction…
PDF arXiv
arXiv cs.SEOct 26
Can AI Guide Testing Without Generating Tests? A Comparative Study of AI-Assisted Unit Testing
Zihan Fang, Ron Asoulin-Handelman, Helen Wu, Yu Huang, Gina R. Bai
Recent advances in generative AI have enabled assistants to generate increasingly sophisticated executable unit tests. However, novices may accept these outputs without independently identifying what to test, evaluating test-suite completeness, or verifying correctness, potentially limiting opportunities to develop essential testing skills. Although prior work has explored AI-assisted test generation and feedback-oriented programming tutors, little is known about whether AI can support novices' testing practices without generating tests for them. To investigate this, we introduce TestCompass, a generative AI tutor that provides targeted feedback on weaknesses in students' test suites without generating executable tests. In a classroom study with 18 students, we compared TestCompass with a general AI assistant across two Java unit-testing tasks, examining students' testing behaviors, test-suite quality, and subjective experiences. We found that participants using the general-purpose AI assistant produced more tests, whereas TestCompass participants spent more time developing and verifying tests themselves. However, most test-suite quality measures were comparable between…
PDF arXiv
arXiv cs.MAOct 26
Replication or Corroboration? An Axiomatic Framework for Evidential Dependence in Multi-Agent Debate
Hoang-Loc Cao, Truong Thanh Hung Nguyen, Phuc Truong Loc Nguyen, Vo Thanh Khang Nguyen, Phuc Ho +4
In multi-agent debates, matching reports can arise for two different reasons: agents may repeat the same evidence (replication), or they may provide separate evidential roots that support the same claim (corroboration). A judge must distinguish these two cases. Counting report occurrences gives extra weight to relays, paraphrases, alias resubmissions, and excerpt splits, while merging all matching content avoids this only by also removing genuine corroboration. We formalize this tension as a minimal judgment game in which acquiring new evidence is costly, but replication is cheap. We show that root replication invariance (RRI) is exactly threshold-uniform replication immunity. Under RRI, replication-only deviations cannot change the verdict, and positive-cost replication is strictly dominated, whereas occurrence-sensitive and content-keyed judges admit profitable deviations. We also establish an information boundary: if a judge's observation interface cannot distinguish a replica from a matched fresh root, no judge can both ignore the replica and respond strictly to the fresh root. To preserve this distinction, we introduce the lineage quotient, which removes wording, identity,…
PDF arXiv
arXiv cs.AIOct 26
Why and How to Do Science When AI Is Better at It: A Framework Grounded in Human Understanding and Direction
Hoda Heidari, Aydin Mohseni
As AI begins to match or exceed human researchers at core scientific tasks, two questions become pressing: \emph{why} should humans keep doing science, and \emph{how} should they use AI when they do? This paper argues that the second can be answered only by answering the first. It holds that one indispensable aim of science is \emph{durable, collective human understanding of the world, pursued in service of human ends and values}. From this principle it derives a two-part test for when a research task can be delegated to AI. The first part, \emph{human understanding}, requires that the scientific community remain able to explain, defend and contest the resulting claims, and retain the skills to do so. The second, \emph{human direction}, requires that judgments about which questions matter and what findings mean stay with accountable humans. Applying the test to each phase of research in the Contributor Roles Taxonomy (CRediT) yields recommendations that fields can tailor to their questions and methods. The framework differs from existing guidance in three ways. It rests on an account of what science is for rather than on integrity norms. It holds even if AI outperforms human…
PDF arXiv
arXiv cs.SEOct 26
Context Is a Pipeline, Not a Window: Information Attrition in LLM Agent Harnesses
Yuvraj Sehgal, Mahsa Panahandeh, Naser Ezzati-Jivan
LLM agents are judged by two numbers: the size of the context window, and how often the final answer is correct. Both numbers miss a third thing: how much of a tool's output is lost before the model ever sees it. We measured this loss in a real tool-using agent. The agent finds the cause of injected faults by reading Linux kernel traces. The context window was almost empty: across 720 runs, the single largest prompt used only 5.75% of it. Yet a third of all tool results (3,827 of 11,189) were cut before they reached the model, and every cut result became broken JSON. The harness cut each result by slicing its JSON text at a fixed length. This does not shorten a result evenly. It deletes whatever data sits near the end. One field reached the model in only 4.7% of calls. A second field, in the very same results, reached the model in 99.3% of calls. Which field held the fault's evidence depended on when the faulty process started: early or late in the trace. The agent's diagnosis accuracy matched this same split. So we ran controlled experiments to test one question: did the data loss cause the drop in accuracy? This paper makes four contributions. First, we model an agent's context…
PDF arXiv

Papers

Open problems in Recursive self improvement

Gradient conflicts in multi-teacher distillation1 paper raises it · 1 addresses it
Conflicting teacher signals degrade joint optimization and cause capability loss when training a single student from multiple teachers.
- Beyond Domain-Routed Supervision: Cross-Teacher Guarding for Multi-Teacher On-Policy Distillationraises · addresses
Unreliable supervision in cross-tokenizer distillation1 paper raises it · 1 addresses it
Vocabulary mismatch and alignment coverage issues make teacher feedback noisy or harmful for student training.
- Rethinking Cross-Tokenizer On-Policy Distillation: From Alignment Coverage to Supervision Reliabilityraises · addresses
Inconsistent policy shifts during teacher training1 paper raises it · 1 addresses it
Endpoint policy shifts may hide early and late preference changes that cancel out, leading to poor transfer.
- Waypoint-OPD: Transferring RL-Induced Policy Shifts via Gated On-Policy Distillationraises · addresses
Lack of decision-grounded trajectory supervision1 paper raises it · 1 addresses it
Successful trajectories often include actions unsupported by the agent's visible history, reducing learning effectiveness.
- Trajectory2Gym: Decision-Grounded Compositional Interaction Synthesis for Tool-Use Agentsraises · addresses
Credit assignment in long-horizon agent training1 paper raises it · 1 addresses it
Critic values vary across turns, making fine-grained credit allocation and policy updates difficult.
- Multiscale Policy Optimization for Long-Horizon LLM Agentsraises · addresses

Named by an AI from these papers' abstracts.

Open problems

Topics in this field

recursive self improvement · ai · agent520 papers34 this week
teacher policy distillation · policy distillation opd · teacher supervision354 papers18 this week
multi agent debate · ai agents · agent debate231 papers18 this week
agent collaboration · multi agent · based multi agent206 papers18 this week
conversational agents · user simulators · user simulation173 papers17 this week
scientific agents · research agents · ai agents196 papers16 this week

Topics in this field

Active contributors · 90 days

Active contributors

Activity · 12 weeks

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Recent papers

All papers in Research

arXiv cs.AIOct 26
MAREval: A Multi-Agent Framework for Evaluating Natural Language Recommendation Explanations
Reza Yousefi Maragheh, Jayesh Uddhav Kudase, Aysenur Inan, Ramin Giahi, Kai Zhao +5
Evaluating natural language explanations in recommender systems is essential for fostering user trust, transparency, and engagement. However, existing evaluation approaches like human evaluations, while accurate, are resource-intensive and impractical at the scale required by modern recommendation platforms. Also, automated methods using single-agent LLMs suffer from prompt sensitivity and inconsistent outputs. To address these challenges, we propose MAREval, a structured multi-agent framework for evaluating recommendation explanations using large language models. MAREval orchestrates (i) a planner agent that uses a novel Chain of Debate (CoD) prompting strategy to coordinate agent roles and enforce logically consistent evaluation plans; (ii) a moderator agent that regulates discussions by mitigating prompt drift; and (iii) an arbitrator agent that aggregates outputs from multiple evaluation rounds and (iv) a Monte Carlo sampling method, improving robustness and alignment with human judgment. We conduct comprehensive evaluations on both public (TopicalChat) and proprietary recommendation datasets, demonstrating that MAREval outperforms state-of-the-art baselines. Comprehensive…
PDF arXiv
arXiv cs.LGOct 26
Base Models Can Detect Hidden Intentions that Prompted Classifiers Miss
Oz Amram
The Persona Selection Model (PSM) posits that post-training selects a persona the model learned during pre-training. Work on subliminal learning has shown that models can impart covert signals (like "love of owls") into semantically unrelated outputs like strings of numbers, and that students trained on these outputs inherit those traits. In this work I show that by evaluating the likelihood of such outputs under the base pre-trained model with an appropriate header, a method I call persona-header likelihood evaluation (PHLE), one can decode these subliminal signals and classify between them. For example, PHLE distinguishes number sequences generated by a post-trained model prompted with "You love owls" from those prompted with "You love eagles", and distinguishes answers from a model with a secret desire to harm the user, filtered to remove any noticeable misalignment, from those of a model with no system prompt. In both cases prompted classifiers, including the generating model itself, remain near chance. The signal partially persists across model families, with the Qwen base model reading signals generated by Olmo and vice versa. This is evidence for a non-trivial prediction…
PDF arXiv
arXiv cs.SEOct 26
Can AI Guide Testing Without Generating Tests? A Comparative Study of AI-Assisted Unit Testing
Zihan Fang, Ron Asoulin-Handelman, Helen Wu, Yu Huang, Gina R. Bai
Recent advances in generative AI have enabled assistants to generate increasingly sophisticated executable unit tests. However, novices may accept these outputs without independently identifying what to test, evaluating test-suite completeness, or verifying correctness, potentially limiting opportunities to develop essential testing skills. Although prior work has explored AI-assisted test generation and feedback-oriented programming tutors, little is known about whether AI can support novices' testing practices without generating tests for them. To investigate this, we introduce TestCompass, a generative AI tutor that provides targeted feedback on weaknesses in students' test suites without generating executable tests. In a classroom study with 18 students, we compared TestCompass with a general AI assistant across two Java unit-testing tasks, examining students' testing behaviors, test-suite quality, and subjective experiences. We found that participants using the general-purpose AI assistant produced more tests, whereas TestCompass participants spent more time developing and verifying tests themselves. However, most test-suite quality measures were comparable between…
PDF arXiv
arXiv cs.MAOct 26
Replication or Corroboration? An Axiomatic Framework for Evidential Dependence in Multi-Agent Debate
Hoang-Loc Cao, Truong Thanh Hung Nguyen, Phuc Truong Loc Nguyen, Vo Thanh Khang Nguyen, Phuc Ho +4
In multi-agent debates, matching reports can arise for two different reasons: agents may repeat the same evidence (replication), or they may provide separate evidential roots that support the same claim (corroboration). A judge must distinguish these two cases. Counting report occurrences gives extra weight to relays, paraphrases, alias resubmissions, and excerpt splits, while merging all matching content avoids this only by also removing genuine corroboration. We formalize this tension as a minimal judgment game in which acquiring new evidence is costly, but replication is cheap. We show that root replication invariance (RRI) is exactly threshold-uniform replication immunity. Under RRI, replication-only deviations cannot change the verdict, and positive-cost replication is strictly dominated, whereas occurrence-sensitive and content-keyed judges admit profitable deviations. We also establish an information boundary: if a judge's observation interface cannot distinguish a replica from a matched fresh root, no judge can both ignore the replica and respond strictly to the fresh root. To preserve this distinction, we introduce the lineage quotient, which removes wording, identity,…
PDF arXiv
arXiv cs.AIOct 26
Why and How to Do Science When AI Is Better at It: A Framework Grounded in Human Understanding and Direction
Hoda Heidari, Aydin Mohseni
As AI begins to match or exceed human researchers at core scientific tasks, two questions become pressing: \emph{why} should humans keep doing science, and \emph{how} should they use AI when they do? This paper argues that the second can be answered only by answering the first. It holds that one indispensable aim of science is \emph{durable, collective human understanding of the world, pursued in service of human ends and values}. From this principle it derives a two-part test for when a research task can be delegated to AI. The first part, \emph{human understanding}, requires that the scientific community remain able to explain, defend and contest the resulting claims, and retain the skills to do so. The second, \emph{human direction}, requires that judgments about which questions matter and what findings mean stay with accountable humans. Applying the test to each phase of research in the Contributor Roles Taxonomy (CRediT) yields recommendations that fields can tailor to their questions and methods. The framework differs from existing guidance in three ways. It rests on an account of what science is for rather than on integrity norms. It holds even if AI outperforms human…
PDF arXiv
arXiv cs.SEOct 26
Context Is a Pipeline, Not a Window: Information Attrition in LLM Agent Harnesses
Yuvraj Sehgal, Mahsa Panahandeh, Naser Ezzati-Jivan
LLM agents are judged by two numbers: the size of the context window, and how often the final answer is correct. Both numbers miss a third thing: how much of a tool's output is lost before the model ever sees it. We measured this loss in a real tool-using agent. The agent finds the cause of injected faults by reading Linux kernel traces. The context window was almost empty: across 720 runs, the single largest prompt used only 5.75% of it. Yet a third of all tool results (3,827 of 11,189) were cut before they reached the model, and every cut result became broken JSON. The harness cut each result by slicing its JSON text at a fixed length. This does not shorten a result evenly. It deletes whatever data sits near the end. One field reached the model in only 4.7% of calls. A second field, in the very same results, reached the model in 99.3% of calls. Which field held the fault's evidence depended on when the faulty process started: early or late in the trace. The agent's diagnosis accuracy matched this same split. So we ran controlled experiments to test one question: did the data loss cause the drop in accuracy? This paper makes four contributions. First, we model an agent's context…
PDF arXiv