SEAGym: An Evaluation Environment for Self-Evolving LLM Agents
On the map: LLM agents and tool use → General LLM agent frameworks and benchmarks
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Abstract (arXiv)
Self-evolving LLM-based agents improve mainly by changing their agent harness: the structured execution layer around a base model, including prompts, memory, tools, middleware, runtime state, and the model-tool interaction loop. Existing evaluations often reduce this process to isolated task scores or a single sequential curve, obscuring whether an update produces reusable improvement, overfits recent tasks, increases cost, or harms older behavior. We introduce SEAGym, an evaluation environment for measuring agent harness updates across training, validation, test, replay, and cost records. SEAGym turns Harbor-compatible benchmarks into dynamic self-evolution task sources with train batches, frozen update-validation, held-out ID and OOD transfer views, replay diagnostics, and saved snapshot and metric records. Instantiating SEAGym on Terminal-Bench 2.0 and HLE, we compare ACE, TF-GRPO, and AHE under a shared epoch/batch protocol. The results show that these evaluation views provide complementary signals about the evolution process: frequent updates may fail to improve held-out performance, useful intermediate snapshots may collapse later, and source diversity and model backend can affect harness reliability.
Key facts. Cited by 8 papers in the map (data through 7 Oct 2026). Placed in General LLM agent frameworks and benchmarks, one of 16 directions in LLM agents and tool use. Builds on 33 of its 55 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 16 Jun 2026.
Builds on
33 of 55 references.
Closest ancestors · 4
Same direction, newest first
- 2026SEA-Eval: A Benchmark for Evaluating Self-Evolving Agents Beyond Episodic Assessment10 Apr
- 2025A Comprehensive Survey of Self-Evolving AI Agents: A New Paradigm Bridging Foundation Models and Lifelong Agentic Systems10 Aug
- 2025Survey on Evaluation of LLM-based Agents20 Mar
- 2024τ-bench: A Benchmark for Tool-Agent-User Interaction in Real-World Domains17 Jun
Other references · 29
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- 2017Gradient Episodic Memory for Continual Learningcited by 1,871
- 2018Continual Lifelong Learning with Neural Networks: A Reviewcited by 1,313
- 2023Gorilla: Large Language Model Connected with Massive APIscited by 1,302
- 2024OSWorld: Benchmarking Multimodal Agents for Open-Ended Tasks in Real Computer Environmentscited by 1,134
17 more
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- 2024EASYTOOL: Enhancing LLM-based Agents with Concise Tool Instructioncited by 153
- 2026Agentic Harness Engineering: Observability-Driven Automatic Evolution of Coding-Agent Harnessescited by 119
- 2025A survey of agent interoperability protocols: Model Context Protocol (MCP), Agent Communication Protocol (ACP), Agent-to-Agent Protocol (A2A), and Agent Network Protocol (ANP)cited by 98
- 2025How Memory Management Impacts LLM Agents: An Empirical Study of Experience-Following Behaviorcited by 95
- 2025Agent KB: Leveraging Cross-Domain Experience for Agentic Problem Solvingcited by 90
- 2025Process Reward Models for LLM Agents: Practical Framework and Directionscited by 81
- 2025LifelongAgentBench: Evaluating LLM Agents as Lifelong Learnerscited by 65
- 2026Natural-Language Agent Harnessescited by 54
- 2025Training-Free Group Relative Policy Optimizationcited by 53
Built on by
Citing papers per year: 2026: 8.
8 papers.
- 2026Evo-Bench: Can Language Models Improve Agent Harness?cited by 8
- 2026HarnessDev: Can LLMs Create and Evolve Their Own Agent Harness?cited by 7
- 2026The Last AI Built by Humans: Toward Genuine Recursive Self-Improvementcited by 5
- 2026S3Gym: Can LLMs Turn Self-Testing and Self-Judging into Self-Improvement?cited by 3
- 2026FinEvo-Bench: A Longitudinal Benchmark for Self-Evolving Agents in Professional Financial Workflowscited by 1
- 2026Belief-Calibrated Optimization: An Explicit World Model for Agentic Optimizationcited by 1
- 2026Compiled Agency: Frontier General-Purpose Coding Agents Build Winning Game Players from Bare Interaction - from Flappy Bird to StarCraft II and Civilizationcited by 0
- 2026Self-Evolving Harness on Multiple Tasks with the Agent as Its Own Optimizercited by 0
- 2026Self-Evolving Harness on Multiple Tasks with the Agent as Its Own Optimizer29 Sep 2026
- 2026The Last AI Built by Humans: Toward Genuine Recursive Self-Improvement10 Sep 2026
- 2026Belief-Calibrated Optimization: An Explicit World Model for Agentic Optimization1 Sep 2026
- 2026HarnessDev: Can LLMs Create and Evolve Their Own Agent Harness?1 Sep 2026
- 2026S3Gym: Can LLMs Turn Self-Testing and Self-Judging into Self-Improvement?31 Aug 2026
- 2026Evo-Bench: Can Language Models Improve Agent Harness?10 Aug 2026
- 2026FinEvo-Bench: A Longitudinal Benchmark for Self-Evolving Agents in Professional Financial Workflows6 Aug 2026
- 2026Compiled Agency: Frontier General-Purpose Coding Agents Build Winning Game Players from Bare Interaction - from Flappy Bird to StarCraft II and Civilization17 Jul 2026
Similar, not cited
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- 2026BenchTrace: A Benchmark for Testing Reflection Ability and Controlled Evolution in LLM Agents
- 2026TTHE: Test-Time Harness Evolution
- 2026VERSE: Verified Self-Evolving Optimizer for Agent Harnesses
- 2026Rethinking the Evaluation of Harness Evolution for Agents
- 2026EvoAgentBench: Benchmarking Agent Self-Evolution via Ability Transfer
- 2026Adaptive Auto-Harness: Sustained Self-Improvement for Agentic System Deployment on Open-Ended Task Streams
- 2026Harness Updating Is Not Harness Benefit: Disentangling Evolution Capabilities in Self-Evolving LLM Agents
- 2026Self-Harness: Harnesses That Improve Themselves