AI Agents

Group-Evolving Agents: Open-Ended Self-Improvement via Experience Sharing

ZZhaotian WengAAntonis AntoniadesDDeepak NathaniZZhen ZhangXXiao PuXXin Eric Wang
Published
February 4, 2026
Authors
6
Word Count
6,425
Code
Includes code

Group-Evolving Agents facilitate open-ended AI self-improvement.

Abstract

Open-ended self-improving agents can autonomously modify their own structural designs to advance their capabilities and overcome the limits of pre-defined architectures, thus reducing reliance on human intervention. We introduce Group-Evolving Agents (GEA), a new paradigm for open-ended self-improvements, which treats a group of agents as the fundamental evolutionary unit, enabling explicit experience sharing and reuse within the group throughout evolution. Unlike existing open-ended self-evolving paradigms that adopt tree-structured evolution, GEA overcomes the limitation of inefficient utilization of exploratory diversity caused by isolated evolutionary branches. We evaluate GEA on challenging coding benchmarks, where it significantly outperforms state-of-the-art self-evolving methods (71.0% vs. 56.7% on SWE-bench Verified, 88.3% vs. 68.3% on Polyglot) and matches or exceeds top human-designed agent frameworks (71.8% and 52.0% on two benchmarks, respectively). Analysis reveals that GEA more effectively converts early-stage exploratory diversity into sustained, long-term progress, achieving stronger performance under the same number of evolved agents. Furthermore, GEA exhibits consistent transferability across different coding models and greater robustness, fixing framework-level bugs in 1.4 iterations on average, versus 5 for self-evolving methods.

Key Takeaways

  • 1

    Group-Evolving Agents enable effective experience sharing among agents.

  • 2

    Performance-Novelty criterion balances performance gains and diversity.

  • 3

    GEA transforms transient variations into long-term useful experience.

Limitations

  • GEA requires a group of agents, not individual agents.

  • Evaluation is limited to coding benchmarks.

Keywords

open-ended self-improving agentsstructural design modificationevolutionary unitexperience sharingexploratory diversityself-evolving methodscoding benchmarksSWE-bench VerifiedPolyglotagent frameworksframework-level bugs

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