Papers for

interactive software developers

Papers whose findings have a practical use for this group, as judged from the abstract. Open a paper to read what it means in practice.

Recursive self-improving agent orchestration boosts complex task solving

R$^2$Orch: Recursive Self-Improvement for Agent Orchestration via Self-Play within a Skill-Internalization Loop

Abstract: In recent years, agentic orchestration has been widely applied to solve complex human tasks. However, existing orchestration learning still faces key challenges, including hand-designed curricula, advantage collapse when a task's rollouts all reach the same outcome, and unreliable evaluation signals that judge each skill by one noisy score. To address these challenges, we propose R$^2$Orch, a new paradigm of Recursive Self-Play Orchestration: an inner loop of self-play that improves the orchestrator on self-chosen tasks, and an outer loop that improves how the inner loop improves. To support this paradigm, we introduce Recursive Learnability, a training objective that rewards a Proposer for choosing tasks whose rollouts keep reaching different outcomes as skills are withdrawn. Built on this objective, we further propose Skill Withdrawal, in which the outer loop withdraws each skill once a controlled evaluation within self-play shows that the orchestrator performs as well without it. Moreover, the two loops form one cycle: failures are distilled into skills, skills into parameters, and withdrawals lead the Proposer to new failures, so the orchestrator moves toward zero-skill deployment. Experimental results on twelve datasets show that R$^2$Orch consistently outperforms baselines across question answering, math, code, and interactive tasks.

Thu 15 OctArtificial Intelligence
The gist
Solving complicated tasks with AI agents often requires guiding them carefully and dealing with unreliable signals to measure their skills. To improve this, the authors designed a system called R2Orch that teaches an AI orchestrator to get better by playing against itself on tasks it chooses. It gradually removes skills once they become unnecessary and learns from failures to improve further. This approach was tested on many types of tasks like answering questions and writing code, showing better results than older methods.
Open → 2610.22740v1

Behavior-adaptive skill curation improves self-evolving AI agents

EASE: Behavior-Adaptive Skill Curation for Self-Evolving Agents

Abstract: Agent skills provide a lightweight mechanism for self-evolving agents to accumulate reusable procedural knowledge without updating model parameters. However, existing learned skill curators typically optimize curation without explicitly modeling downstream executor behavior. We show that this can cause systematic cross-executor degradation: curators trained with different executors perform best when paired with their own training executor, indicating that effective skill curation is executor-dependent. We formulate behavior-adaptive skill curation and introduce EASE, a framework that learns a single curator that adapts its decisions to different executor behaviors. EASE maintains an online behavioral profile of recent execution patterns and conditions the curator on this profile, the current trajectory, and retrieved skills to add, modify, or remove skills from an evolving repository. We train the shared curator jointly across multiple frozen executors with reinforcement learning, using retrieval-aware and behavior-aware temporal attribution to focus optimization on curation actions with observable downstream influence. Across ALFWorld, ScienceWorld, and WebShop, with executors ranging from Qwen3-8B/32B and GPT-OSS-120B to unseen Kimi K2.6, DeepSeek V4 Flash, and Gemini 3.5 Flash, EASE outperforms strong skill- and memory-based baselines without per-executor finetuning. EASE also maintains 34.5--41.0% fewer skills, improves skill retrieval by 36.3--38.7% and measured edit utility by 51.8--60.0%, and reduces deployment-time inference tokens by 9.1--14.5%. These results establish behavior-adaptive skill curation as an effective principle for building self-evolving agents.

Tue 29 SeptArtificial Intelligence
The gist
AI agents use skills to perform tasks without changing their core learning model, but picking the right skills depends on how the AI behaves. The authors found that skill selection works best when tailored to the AI's behavior. They created EASE, which tracks how an AI performs recently and adjusts the skills it chooses based on that behavior. This approach works well across different AI systems, uses fewer skills, and makes the AI's task performance more efficient.
Open → 2609.36746v1