Evo2: Evolving the Evolver through Weight-Harness Co-Evolution
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Abstract (arXiv)
Self-evolving agents are increasingly used to improve language model systems without human intervention through either weight updates or harness improvements. Existing approaches typically pursue these directions separately: some methods update model weights using self-generated experience, while others rewrite the harness that defines how an agent uses prompts, tools, context, and execution feedback. However, these approaches overlook the relationship between model weights and the agent harness. To connect these processes and ensure effective and smooth agent self-evolving, we propose Evo2, a framework for weight-harness co-evolution. For harness updates, we design a unified dual-role pipeline that a single policy serves as both a Proposer, which writes harness edits, and a Reflector, which diagnoses their effects and guides revision. For weight updates, harness modifications and their execution outcomes guide the training of both the Proposer and the Reflector. We further develop EvoTIDE, a training pipeline that recovers usable trajectories through edit extraction and prefix continuation, then combines SFT with interleaved GRPO across the two roles. Extensive experiments across three coding benchmarks demonstrate that Evo2 significantly outperforms existing self-evolution methods. It achieves 82.1% on Polyglot and 48.3% on SWE-bench Verified, compared with 62.6% and 41.0% for the strongest baseline, respectively. We also show that the evolved harnesses transfer to different tasks without further evolution and rank first in cross-benchmark evaluations. Our dual-role harness improvement framework is also able to extend to self-evolution with proprietary models, improving a GPT-5-mini agent's performance from 24.4% to 48.3%. These results demonstrate the applicability of the framework Evo2 across domains and its broad transferability across models and tasks.
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References · 22
- 2024DeepSeekMath: Pushing the Limits of Mathematical Reasoning in Open Language Modelscited by 9,379
- 2025GEPA: Reflective Prompt Evolution Can Outperform Reinforcement Learningcited by 542
- 2025Darwin Godel Machine: Open-Ended Evolution of Self-Improving Agentscited by 356
- 2023Beyond Human Data: Scaling Self-Training for Problem-Solving with Language Modelscited by 349
- 2025Absolute Zero: Reinforced Self-play Reasoning with Zero Datacited by 344
- 2026Meta-Harness: End-to-End Optimization of Model Harnessescited by 309
- 2025R-Zero: Self-Evolving Reasoning LLM from Zero Datacited by 228
- 2025A Comprehensive Survey of Self-Evolving AI Agents: A New Paradigm Bridging Foundation Models and Lifelong Agentic Systemscited by 183
- 2025A Survey of Self-Evolving Agents: What, When, How, and Where to Evolve on the Path to Artificial Super Intelligencecited by 170
- 2025EvolveR: Self-Evolving LLM Agents through an Experience-Driven Lifecyclecited by 137
- 2025A Self-Improving Coding Agentcited by 79
- 2024Self-Taught Evaluatorscited by 72
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- 2025Huxley-G"odel Machine: Human-Level Coding Agent Development by an Approximation of the Optimal Self-Improving Machinecited by 53
- 2026Group-Evolving Agents: Open-Ended Self-Improvement via Experience Sharingcited by 36
- 2025Agent0-VL: Exploring Self-Evolving Agent for Tool-Integrated Vision-Language Reasoningcited by 31
- 2026The Red Queen G"odel Machine: Co-Evolving Agents and Their Evaluatorscited by 19
- 2025ReVeal: Self-Evolving Code Agents via Reliable Self-Verificationcited by 18
- 2026EvoLM: Self-Evolving Language Models through Co-Evolved Discriminative Rubricscited by 13
- 2025Semantic Voting: A Self-Evaluation-Free Approach for Efficient LLM Self-Improvement on Unverifiable Open-ended Taskscited by 7
- 2026Conversation for Non-verifiable Learning: Self-Evolving LLMs through Meta-Evaluationcited by 6
- 2026Better, Faster: Harnessing Self-Improvement in Large Reasoning Modelscited by 3
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- 2026Evo-Bench: Can Language Models Improve Agent Harness?
- 2026DemoEvolve: Overcoming Sparse Feedback in Agentic Harness Evolution with Demonstrations
- 2026Evo-Harness: Context-to-Harness Skill Compilation for Self-Evolving Agents
- 2026PACE: Two-Timescale Self-Evolution for Small Language Model Agents
- 2026Where Does Harness-Optimization Value Live? Localized Gains and the Budget-Splitting Trap in Self-Evolving LLM Agents
- 2026FreeEvolve: Learning to Evolve Beyond Fixed Loops
- 2026Learning from Research: Toward Lifelong Agent Harness Evolution
- 2026HarnessCompass: Guiding Automatic Harness Evolution toward Generalizable and Effective Agent Harnesses