Audit the Scaffold, Not the Checkpoint: A Stationarity Dichotomy for Recursive Self-Improvement in Agentic Coding
An auditor who checks whether a system's weights are frozen is checking the wrong thing. Our stationarity dichotomy says that iterative self-modification hits strict diminishing returns whenever the agent's reachable set of edits stays fixed, and can escape only if that set expands. Rewriting scaffolding (tools, verifiers, decomposition) expands what an agent reaches without touching a weight, so frozen weights buy an eventual ceiling but no stationarity along the way. The criterion also separates three regimes usually merged: search within a fixed class, test-time training that raises the ceiling itself, and scaffold rewriting between them. Audit the scaffold, not the checkpoint. The sam...
| Authors | Sebastian Bobadilla-Suarez, Bob Suh, Ryan Fortin |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.LG |
| Published | 28 September 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 28 September 2026 |
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