SelfImprove-Bench: Evaluating Generalization in Self-Improving Agents

Recursively self-improving (RSI) systems are increasingly viewed as a promising means of accelerating progress toward artificial general intelligence. They aim to autonomously improve their capabilities by refining their working pipelines and recursively improving the strategies that guide subsequent refinements, with gains generalizing to unseen scenarios.However, existing evaluations lack reliable metrics to distinguish capability gains from scenario fitting, sustainable and extensible protocols for unseen tasks and difficulties, and fine-grained attribution of improvement to evolution traces. To this end, we propose SelfImprove-Bench,an RSI evaluation framework that organizes tasks into three primary capabilities (i.e., Exploring, Planning, Reasoning) as scenarios for guiding model evolution. We instantiated the tasks on games for controllability and reproducibility, and pairs them with scalable generation and orchestration driven by task templates and difficulty coefficients. Beyond task-level scores, SelfImprove-Bench organizes evaluation into generalization ladder levels G0 to G4 that measure how far gains transfer from training conditions. Experiments reveal that the evolutionary gains of existing RSI methods are inconsistent across generalization levels.

Authors

Publication Details

Journal
arXiv (Cornell University)
Published
2026-11-02
DOI
https://doi.org/10.48550/arxiv.2611.02797
Primary Topic
Evolutionary Algorithms and Applications
Type
preprint
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preprint

SelfImprove-Bench: Evaluating Generalization in Self-Improving Agents

Xu BangRui, Sidi Chen, Qianyu Yang, Xuanhe Zhou et al.
arXiv (Cornell University)
Evolutionary Algorithms and Applications
preprint

SelfImprove-Bench: Evaluating Generalization in Self-Improving Agents

Xu BangRui, Sidi Chen, Qianyu Yang, Xuanhe Zhou, Jie Yang, Jiantao Qiu, Zhoufutu Wen, Fan Wu, Zijie Wang
preprint en

Abstract

Recursively self-improving (RSI) systems are increasingly viewed as a promising means of accelerating progress toward artificial general intelligence. They aim to autonomously improve their capabilities by refining their working pipelines and recursively improving the strategies that guide subsequent refinements, with gains generalizing to unseen scenarios.However, existing evaluations lack reliable metrics to distinguish capability gains from scenario fitting, sustainable and extensible protocols for unseen tasks and difficulties, and fine-grained attribution of improvement to evolution traces. To this end, we propose SelfImprove-Bench,an RSI evaluation framework that organizes tasks into three primary capabilities (i.e., Exploring, Planning, Reasoning) as scenarios for guiding model evolution. We instantiated the tasks on games for controllability and reproducibility, and pairs them with scalable generation and orchestration driven by task templates and difficulty coefficients. Beyond task-level scores, SelfImprove-Bench organizes evaluation into generalization ladder levels G0 to G4 that measure how far gains transfer from training conditions. Experiments reveal that the evolutionary gains of existing RSI methods are inconsistent across generalization levels.

arXiv (Cornell University)
Evolutionary Algorithms and Applications
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