Auditing the Product, Not the Recursion: The Evaluation Evidence Behind Recursive Self-Improvement Claims
Recursive self-improvement (RSI) promises AI systems, such as self-evolving LLM agents, that become better at producing further improvements. Evaluating this promise requires separating product claims about the final system from process claims about the improvement process itself. Existing surveys specify the evidence these claims require, but how often studies report that evidence remains unmeasured. We examine this question through full-text coding of 114 eligible studies in a reproducible arXiv search frame frozen in October 2026, including 90 that describe their own systems as RSI. The codebook links claims to evaluation designs. Independent human coding, third-reader adjudication, an...
| Authors | Zihan Chen, Di Zhu, Lei Nico Zheng |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.LG |
| Published | 20 October 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 20 October 2026 |
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