{"paper":{"title":"Recursive Self-Evolving Agents via Held-Out Selection","license":"http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/","headline":"","cross_cats":[],"primary_cat":"cs.AI","authors_text":"Michael Nguyen, Paul Vuong, Quoc Nguyen","submitted_at":"2026-06-17T14:53:36Z","abstract_excerpt":"LLM agents are increasingly improved without weight updates by evolving a natural-language artifact, such as reflections, workflows, playbooks, cheatsheets, or optimized prompts, that conditions a frozen policy. Such methods are typically reported as wins on the single benchmark where they help. We study them apples-to-apples and surface a sharper picture. We introduce RSEA, a Recursive Self-Evolving Agent that carries a compact three-layer natural-language state: an imperative strategy, reusable skills, and a procedural playbook. Across generations, RSEA rewrites all three layers from its own"},"claims":{"count":0,"items":[],"snapshot_sha256":"258153158e38e3291e3d48162225fcdb2d5a3ed65a07baac614ab91432fd4f57"},"source":{"id":"2606.28374","kind":"arxiv","version":1},"verdict":{"id":null,"model_set":{},"created_at":null,"strongest_claim":"","one_line_summary":"","pipeline_version":null,"weakest_assumption":"","pith_extraction_headline":""},"integrity":{"clean":true,"summary":{"advisory":0,"critical":0,"by_detector":{},"informational":0},"endpoint":"/pith/2606.28374/integrity.json","findings":[],"available":true,"detectors_run":[],"snapshot_sha256":"c28c3603d3b5d939e8dc4c7e95fa8dfce3d595e45f758748cecf8e644a296938"},"references":{"count":0,"sample":[],"resolved_work":0,"snapshot_sha256":"258153158e38e3291e3d48162225fcdb2d5a3ed65a07baac614ab91432fd4f57","internal_anchors":0},"formal_canon":{"evidence_count":0,"snapshot_sha256":"258153158e38e3291e3d48162225fcdb2d5a3ed65a07baac614ab91432fd4f57"},"author_claims":{"count":0,"strong_count":0,"snapshot_sha256":"258153158e38e3291e3d48162225fcdb2d5a3ed65a07baac614ab91432fd4f57"},"builder_version":"pith-number-builder-2026-05-17-v1"}