AIMode.newsSearch
Live

SBCO: Self-Supervised, Verifier-Grounded Harness Optimization For Planning Agents

A

arXiv cs.AI

AIMode News Desk · curated summary

1 min readAI

Automated news aggregation. Headlines and summaries are gathered from public feeds; see our editorial standards for sourcing, corrections, and AI-assist disclosure.

arXiv:2608.10157v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Self-improving agents seek to reduce the human engineering effort behind AI systems by enabling them to evolve and self-improve their performance over time. Recently, methods like the Darwin G\"odel Machine and the Huxley G\"odel Machine have been proposed which enable open-ended, recursive self-improvement through self-reference where a coding agent edits its own code. Such self-referential self-improvement methods require that the competence required to perform the task coincides or aligns well with the competence required for self-modification which is the case for coding tasks. For domains or tasks, which do not satisfy the alignment needed, self-referential self-improvement is not available. In such cases, it is possible to adapt the above algorithms to other tasks by removing the self-referential aspect or introducing explicit self-modification of a meta-agent -- both computationally expensive, relying on population or self-modification search over many candidate agents. For planning tasks with explicit constraints, we propose a far cheaper alternative. We introduce SBCO (Self-supervised Block Coordinate Optimizer), a verifier-grounded harness optimizer in the same closed-loop, improve-from-experience family as the G\"odel-machine methods, but self-supervised rather than self-referential. Given an agentic harness, SBCO learns a decomposed bank of verifiers and a harness policy via approximate block coordinate ascent, improving the agent's outputs from its own graded feedback---with a fixed meta-agent and no human labels. Across two domains SBCO matches or exceeds a customized self-modifying baseline while using 4-5.5 times less compute budget.

Key takeaways

  • 01arXiv:2608.10157v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Self-improving agents seek to reduce the human engineering effort behind AI systems by enabling them to evolve and self-improve their performance over time.
  • 02Recently, methods like the Darwin G\"odel Machine and the Huxley G\"odel Machine have been proposed which enable open-ended, recursive self-improvement through self-reference where a coding agent edits its own code.
  • 03Such self-referential self-improvement methods require that the competence required to perform the task coincides or aligns well with the competence required for self-modification which is the case for coding tasks.
Advertisement

About this story

This story was aggregated from arXiv cs.AI. Headlines, summaries, and links are gathered automatically from public RSS feeds for your convenience.

Read the full story →

For agents:JSON recordOpenAPIWebMCPllms.txt

Advertisement

More in AI

AI

Dynamic Governance of Multi-LLM Agent Systems for Collaborative Conversational Outcomes

arXiv:2608.11207v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: When two LLM agents with structurally opposed objectives interact across multiple turns, the absence of a shared goal function produces not competition but collapse: the visitor capitulates, the site agent stops varying its approach, and the conversation terminates without achieving either agent's stated objective. This paper asks whether a control-theoretic governance layer can substitute for that missing goal function. The Experience Orchestrator (EO) addresses this in a simulated financial services environment where a site agent guides a visitor toward advisor contact while the visitor maintains psychologically realistic resistance. EO governs the joint trajectory through three mechanisms: a Contextual Bandit (CB) that selects content arms calibrated from real-world web analytics, a PID controller that enforces behavioral consistency via dynamic schema constraints, and a POMDP belief tracker that maintains a probabilistic model of visitor intent. Across 60,000 simulations, EO achieves a +32 percentage point lift in high-intent advisor contact rate (78.1% vs. 46.1% over a naive LLM control), with CB variant selection accounting for 97% of between-factor outcome variance -- confirming that the governance policy, not environmental initial conditions, determines where trajectories end up. Persona-level analysis reveals two distinct regimes: for visitors with no natural inclination toward conversion, the governance layer is the difference between a functional system and a non-functional one; for visitors already near alignment, a naive LLM's empathetic defaults are largely sufficient. All findings are conditional on LLM-to-LLM simulation. The PID controller has not been calibrated against real human unpredictability, and validating EO on live traffic is the critical next step.

arXiv cs.AI ·

AI

Distribird: Literature-Informed Prior Distribution Design for Bayesian Model Calibration

arXiv:2608.11210v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Bayesian calibration of process-based models requires a prior distribution for each model parameter. Despite decades of methodological work, researchers almost always fall back on uniform priors. The main reason is that building informative priors from scientific literature is slow and needs both domain and statistical expertise. We present \textbf{Distribird}, an agentic web application that automates this process. Given a parameter name, physical description, and domain context, Distribird deploys a multi-agent pipeline that searches the literature, extracts and weights reported values by domain relevance, and fits a probability distribution via AIC model selection. When no literature is available, the system falls back to sensible uninformative alternatives, and clearly reports both the evidence behind and the confidence level of every prior it produces. It is designed for the problems where the models have physically interpretable parameters, where domain knowledge exists in the published literature. We evaluate the tool on 24~parameters across 10 scientific domains comparing three open-weight models (Qwen3.6 27B, Gemma 4 31B, Mistral Small 4 119B) with a single-prompt LLM baseline. On prior quality the full pipeline \emph{matches} this baseline. Every prior is traced to the specific papers and values from which it was constructed; a built-in validity layer declines to produce priors for out-of-scope requests, whereas the single-prompt baseline returns confident but unfounded priors for them in 11 of 30~model--parameter cases; and every language-model call runs locally, so no parameter description or unpublished modelling detail is transmitted to a third-party LLM provider (only generated search terms reach the public literature databases). For scientific use, we argue these properties matter more than a marginal improvement in point-estimate accuracy.

arXiv cs.AI ·