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Teaching LLMs to Self-Evolve: Cultivating Core Meta-Skills with Reinforcement Learning

Research LLM Agents

Merged summary

TL;DR - MetaEvolve trains LLMs to iteratively improve solutions using execution feedback, evolution-aware reinforcement learning, and inference-time search. It substantially improves coding and out-of-domain algorithm optimization performance, suggesting self-evolution skills can generalize beyond training tasks.

  • Synthesizes trajectories containing programs, fitness scores based on correctness and efficiency, and prior attempts.
  • Uses reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards from test-case execution.
  • Beats the strongest baseline by 10.01% absolute in-distribution and 24.12% out-of-distribution across seven coding benchmarks.
  • Achieves a 46.9% relative gain on open-ended algorithm optimization problems outside the training domain.

Sources (1)

Teaching LLMs to Self-Evolve: Cultivating Core Meta-Skills with Reinforcement Learning

arXiv cs.LG Shujin Wu, Cheng Qian, Xiusi Chen, Heng Ji 2026-07-24 arXiv:2607.21971

TL;DR - MetaEvolve trains LLMs to iteratively improve solutions using execution feedback, evolution-aware reinforcement learning, and inference-time search. It substantially improves coding and out-of-domain algorithm optimization performance, suggesting self-evolution skills can generalize beyond training tasks.

  • Synthesizes trajectories containing programs, fitness scores based on correctness and efficiency, and prior attempts.
  • Uses reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards from test-case execution.
  • Beats the strongest baseline by 10.01% absolute in-distribution and 24.12% out-of-distribution across seven coding benchmarks.
  • Achieves a 46.9% relative gain on open-ended algorithm optimization problems outside the training domain.
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