SEAR: Self-Evolving Agentic Robotics

Abstract

Frontier language-model agents can now improve robots on their own: they write control code, test it, and keep what works as skills and memories for the next task. We introduce SEAR (Self-Evolving Agentic Robotics), a framework and benchmark built around two questions. Is the agent really learning, or just trying more often? And does what it learns still help on new tasks, in a new simulator, and on a real robot? The framework runs an agent in three modes: it writes code that becomes the policy (code-as-policy), acts live in the control loop (agent-as-policy), or works as a researcher that fine-tunes a vision-language-action model (auto-research). The benchmark adds controls that separate retained experience from repeated attempts, familiar tasks, privileged simulator state, larger budgets, and luck. Across seven frontier language models, 330 simulated and five physical tasks, and over four years of agent runtime, we highlight three findings. First, the learning curve of a robotic agent depends both on the overall time budget and the task difficulty relative to model capability. Harder tasks make longer sessions worthwhile; on easier tasks, re-rolling short attempts does just as well. Second, control code and shared routines transfer across tasks and simulators, while task-specific solutions do not. On a real robot, we observe a performance gap between agent-designed practice and novel human-designed scenes. Third, different models evolve more effectively in different ways. Some do best acting live, others writing code first. And a text-only model keeps pace with a comparable multimodal one: perception helps with error assessment, but agentic reasoning and tool use can matter more. We release the benchmark and codebase to support future research.