Search arXiv⌕ Search
Home/Archive/arXiv

arXiv · 2610.04902

Self-Evaluating Recursive Agents

TianYi Lyu·Xiaozhe Li·Yang Li·Yongkang Chen·Kefei Tian·Junbo Niu·Zican Hu·Hongbo Liu·Mingliang Xiong·Qingwen Liu
View original source ↗Read source document ↗Export metadata ↓

Abstract

Recursive language-model agents decompose tasks and delegate subtasks to child instances of the same policy, forming a tree of work. Training them, however, is hard: the final outcome is verifiable, but the self-invented intermediate subtasks are numerous and carry no ground truth. Existing methods score each node with a verifier or judge, which is costly at scale and blind to decomposition quality. We argue that a recursive agent must learn three coupled capabilities within one set of weights: decomposing problems into subtasks, solving them, and evaluating the outcomes, each requiring its own training signal. SERA (Self-Evaluating Recursive Agents) turns evaluation into a learned capability of the policy itself. Before delegating, the parent writes a rubric of weighted success criteria for each child subtask; a ranking objective against verified outcomes then trains rubric generation so that the criteria track genuine subtask success. In addition, a complementary leaf-coverage signal provides direct credit for task decomposition. Our central finding is that \emph{training} the policy to generate aligned rubrics is what drives the gains: because the same weights both evaluate and execute, learning to judge subtasks sharpens the agent's ability to solve them. Notably, external supervision is also reduced: the judge is consulted only to train the rubric generator, while solving is trained against the agent's own rubric scores, which outperform direct use of the judge. Beyond training, the learned rubric doubles as an inference-time selector for tree search. On TextCraft-Synth and TextWorld-Sync, SERA improves over strong recursive-agent baselines by 5.38 and 13.14 points on average, and rubric-guided tree search at inference adds a further 2.43 points on TextWorld-Sync.

Explore related subjects

cs.AI

Keep this discovery

Explore connections, maps & timelines

BibTeXRIS

TianYi Lyu, Xiaozhe Li, Yang Li, Yongkang Chen, Kefei Tian, Junbo Niu, Zican Hu, Hongbo Liu, Mingliang Xiong, Qingwen Liu. 2026-10-04. Self-Evaluating Recursive Agents. https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.04902

Cite the original work for its findings. Save a collection to share your selection of sources.

KEEP EXPLORING

Related papers

arXiv2026

RoSeViT: Role-Separated Vision Transformers for ARC Visual Reasoning

ARC tasks can be formulated as visual transformation problems, where a model must infer a high-level transformation rule from a small set of demonstrations and apply it consistently across a grid. While dense Vision Transformers (ViTs) perform well in this setting, they entangle local visual state and global transformation logic within a shared token representation, which can hinder consistent reasoning. In this paper, we introduce RoSeViT, a role-separated Vision Transformer that explicitly decouples high-level instruction inference from visual workspace computation. RoSeViT uses controller tokens to aggregate transformation-level information and workspace tokens to represent the visual grid, with a structured attention pass in which nonlocal workspace interactions are routed through the controller. This design is motivated by our formal analysis showing that enforcing a shared instruction representation can reduce the effective complexity of visual transformation modeling. RoSeViT outperforms dense ViT baselines under the standard VARC training and evaluation protocol for ARC. In a controlled backbone replacement setting, it improves ARC-1 accuracy from 54.5 to 56.6, and with recurrent refinement reaches 58.8. When integrated into the full system, RoSeViT-Ensemble improves performance from 60.4 to 62.6 on ARC-1. These results demonstrate that explicitly separating instruction and workspace representations leads to more effective visual reasoning on ARC tasks. GitHub repository: https://github.com/lz7fd/RoSeViT.

cs.AI↗
arXiv2026

Learning to Model Optimization Problems from Solver Outcomes

Automating optimization modeling with LLMs is a promising path toward scalable decision intelligence, but existing approaches either rely on agentic pipelines built on closed-source LLMs with high inference latency or fine-tune smaller LLMs using costly process supervision that often overfits to a single solver API. We study how reinforcement learning from inexpensive outcome labels can improve optimization modeling and support reuse across heterogeneous solver environments. To this end, we propose Optimization Modeling from Solver Outcomes (OMSO), which uses reinforcement learning (RL) with a mathematical programming solver as a deterministic, interactive environment. Given a natural-language problem and a target solver, OMSO generates solver-specific code, executes it in a sandboxed harness, and converts execution outcomes into scalar rewards in a closed-loop generate-execute-feedback-update process. This RL formulation learns optimization modeling without process-level supervision and supports cross-solver generalization by switching the solver environment rather than reconstructing solver-specific datasets. Experiments on NL4OPT, MAMO, IndustryOR, and OptiBench across Gurobi, OR-Tools, and COPT show that OMSO matches or outperforms process-supervised SFT, supports zero-shot training-free transfer, direct RL training, and SFT-cold-started RL, and improves modeling reasoning and semantic correctness beyond solver API usage.

cs.AI↗
arXiv2026

Forget Attention: Importance-Aware Attention Is All You Need

Attention retrieves content precisely, but its scores depend only on query--key products, leaving order and recency to positional encodings. Conversely, state-space models (SSMs) such as Mamba-3 track order and recency through input-dependent state transitions that decay and rotate, yet compressing context into a fixed-size state hampers precise retrieval. Hybrids like Samba and Hymba exploit this complementarity only across layers or heads, so SSM transitions never shape attention scores directly. The closest prior work, the Forgetting Transformer (FoX), adds an input-dependent forget gate to the scores but reweights attention by recency alone. We propose SSM-Informed Softmax Attention (SISA), which builds Mamba-3-style state transitions, rotation included, directly into the scores alongside FoX's gate. Each logit receives the weight such an SSM would give that token pair: a decayed match between rotated SSM projections. This rotation already encodes relative position, so SISA drops RoPE; restoring it raises loss. SISA outperforms parameter-matched Transformer and FoX in language modeling and length extrapolation. Among the attention models we compare, hybrids included, only SISA benefits from context beyond the training window. Building SSM transitions into the scores yields stronger attention, and our kernels make it faster and leaner than baselines on their official or standard kernels.

cs.AI↗