FreeEvolve: Learning to Evolve Beyond Fixed Loops
cs.AI, cs.LG
Submitted: 2026-10-06
Updated: 2026-10-06
Code: https://github.com/algorithmicsuperintelligence/openevolve
License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
The gist: Agent evolvers automate the design of the prompts, skills and workflows around language model agents, yet the optimization process they follow is still designed by hand: a fixed search loop decides
Abstract
Agent evolvers automate the design of the prompts, skills and workflows around language model agents, yet the optimization process they follow is still designed by hand: a fixed search loop decides how candidates are evaluated, which are kept and when the search stops. We propose FREEEVOLVE, which automates this process as well. An environment specifies the goal, target agent, evaluator, data and resource limits; within these limits, the evolver itself decides what to test, how much evidence to collect, which candidates to pursue and when to stop. These decisions follow an editable evolution skill, which we improve through meta-evolution by scoring each candidate skill on the fresh target agent it produces. The optimization process thus becomes a capability learned from experience rather than a loop engineered in advance. On tau3-bench, ARC-AGI-2, ARC-AGI-3 and Terminal-Bench 2.1, FREEEVOLVE controls the evolution campaign by itself, yet improves the primary held-out metric by 13.6 points on average and matches or exceeds hand-designed evolvers. The learned process keeps improving with experience: meta-evolved skills add 6.9 points over the seed skill on fresh target agents, demonstrating transferability across environments.
Sources
- GEPA: Reflective Prompt Evolution Can Outperform Reinforcement Learning
- ARC-AGI-3: A New Challenge for Frontier Agentic Intelligence
- ARC-AGI-2: A New Challenge for Frontier AI Reasoning Systems
- Living-Harness Is an Interactive-Agent Evolver
- AIDE: AI-Driven Exploration in the Space of Code
- Continual Harness: Online Adaptation for Self-Improving Foundation Agents
- Meta-Harness: End-to-End Optimization of Model Harnesses
- Agentic Harness Engineering: Observability-Driven Automatic Evolution of Coding-Agent Harnesses
- EvoX: Meta-Evolution for Automated Discovery
- AutoHarness: improving LLM agents by automatically synthesizing a code harness
- Terminal-Bench: Benchmarking Agents on Hard, Realistic Tasks in Command Line Interfaces
- TTHE: Test-Time Harness Evolution
- AlphaEvolve: A coding agent for scientific and algorithmic discovery
- Bilevel Autoresearch: Meta-Autoresearching Itself
- A Self-Improving Coding Agent
- SkillOpt-Lite: Better and Faster Agent Self-evolution via One Line of Vibe
- $\tau$-Knowledge: Evaluating Conversational Agents over Unstructured Knowledge
- Recursive self-improvement of AI research agents
- Adapting the Interface, Not the Model: Runtime Harness Adaptation for Deterministic LLM Agents
- Meta Context Engineering via Agentic Skill Evolution
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