Self-Authored Verification Is Unreliable in Heuristic Self-Improving Agents
Self-improving agents accumulate capability by repeatedly rewriting procedural policies, controllers, or heuristic rules. They typically rely on self-authored tests or metrics to decide whether to accept subsequent edits. The agent controls both the optimized object and its verifier. As a result, self-assigned scores can remain near perfect while real deployment performance degrades or stays low. We study this problem through the verifier--deployment gap. This gap refers to the discrepancy between an agent's self-authored verification signal and a sealed deployment evaluation that the agent cannot observe or access. We ask how self-authored verification fails under iterative policy-and-te...
| Authors | Diandian Guo, Cong Cao, Fangfang Yuan et al. |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.CL |
| Published | 27 July 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 27 July 2026 |
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