The Blind Curator: How a Biased Judge Silently Disables Skill Retirement in Self-Evolving Agents
A self-evolving agent retires its bad skills by watching them fail, so what happens when the judge cannot see the failures? Skill retirement is the structural constraint that keeps a growing library from drifting below the no-skill baseline, but its guarantee assumes an unbiased reward, which is false for the LLM judges that reference-free tasks require. We show that a biased judge does not merely add noise; it \emph{silently switches off the curator}. We make this precise with a corrupted-reward analysis, then a behavioral study on a reference-free report-writing testbed with a code-generation cross-check, injecting corruption on top of a deterministic reward to isolate the causal channe...
| Authors | Xing Zhang, Yanwei Cui, Guanghui Wang et al. |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.AI |
| Published | 8 July 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 18 August 2026 |
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