G"odel Forest: Balancing Search Depth and Breadth for Data-Centric Recursive Self-Improvement
cs.CL
Submitted: 2026-09-29
Updated: 2026-10-13
Comments: Preprint
Code: https://github.com/evolvent-ai/Godel-Forest
License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
The gist: Recursive self-improvement (RSI) aims to achieve compounding gains by having models improve themselves.
Terminology
Abstract
Recursive self-improvement (RSI) aims to achieve compounding gains by having models improve themselves. While most existing RSI systems optimize external agent harnesses or prompts around a frozen base model, data-centric RSI directly updates the model's own parameters by training on agent-generated data. However, because validating data strategies requires expensive model training, existing methods face a fundamental dilemma: a single agent gets trapped in narrow directions and lacks exploration breadth, while naive parallel search or heavy trace sharing sacrifices long-horizon search depth. To address this challenge, we introduce G"odel Forest, a multi-agent framework that organizes recursive self-improvement as an ensemble of co-evolving search trees. In G"odel Forest, each agent autonomously grows a persistent tree, deepening, branching, or pruning data strategies based on model feedback to secure depth, while parallel trees explore distinct regions of the data space to expand breadth. Crucially, rather than leaving trees isolated or flooding them with heavy execution logs, a dynamically co-evolving memory connects the forest: agents continuously distill their successes and failures into compact procedural lessons anchored to a global leaderboard. Through this forest ecosystem, a dead-end in one tree instantly warns the whole forest against unpromising paths, while an empirical breakthrough quickly seeds new exploration branches in neighboring trees. Evaluated on RSIBench-Data across six diverse domains, G"odel Forest outperforms the single-agent baseline by an average of 10.70% while reducing wall-clock time on five tasks. Ablations confirm that co-evolving shared memory yields a +7.00% gain over independent parallel search, demonstrating that collective distillation is key to scalable self-improvement. The code is available at https://github.com/evolvent-ai/Godel-Forest.
Sources
- FT-Dojo: Towards Autonomous LLM Fine-Tuning with Language Agents
- AutoTrainess: Teaching Language Models to Improve Language Models Autonomously
- ANDES: Agent Native Data Evolving Synthesis Tool for Autonomous Instruction Alignment
- A Self-Improving Coding Agent
- Mendel G\"odel Machine: Recursive Self-Improving Coding Agents via Comparative Evolution
- RSIBench-Data: Benchmarking Data-Centric Research for Recursive Self-Improvement
- Autodata: An agentic data scientist to create high quality synthetic data
- PostTrainBench: Can LLM Agents Automate LLM Post-Training?
- Towards Active Synthetic Data Generation for Finetuning Language Models
- Goedel Machines: Self-Referential Universal Problem Solvers Making Provably Optimal Self-Improvements
- SGM: A Statistical Godel Machine for Risk-Controlled Recursive Self-Modification
- Hyperagents
- The Red Queen G"odel Machine: Co-Evolving Agents and Their Evaluators
- Self-Play Fine-Tuning Converts Weak Language Models to Strong Language Models
- Self-Rewarding Language Models
- SWE-Bench Pro: Can AI Agents Solve Long-Horizon Software Engineering Tasks?
- GPQA: A Graduate-Level Google-Proof Q&A Benchmark
- Qwen3 Technical Report
Related papers
- Exploring Solution Divergence and Its Effect on Large Language Model Problem Solving
- Ishigaki-IDS-Bench: A Benchmark for Generating Information Delivery Specification from BIM Information Requirements
- Subliminal Steering: Stronger Encoding of Hidden Signals
- MedStruct-S: A Benchmark for Key Discovery, Key-Conditioned QA and Semi-Structured Extraction from OCR Clinical Reports
- The End of Transformers? On Challenging Attention and the Rise of Sub-Quadratic Architectures
- Untangling the Mechanisms of Misleading Context in Medical Question Answering