← 首页|学术|Meta$^n$: Recursive Self-Improvement through Emergent Depth
cs.AI, cs.CL, eess.SY · 2608.24735 · 2026-08-25

Meta$^n$: Recursive Self-Improvement through Emergent Depth

Zae Myung Kim, Young-Jun Lee, Seungyeon Jwa, Dongyeop Kang
Recursive Self-ImprovementMeta-LearningAgent Architecture
💬 打破自改进 agent 元层级止步于约 2 层的瓶颈:让唯一的元操作 Ω 保持不变,转而递归地作用于自己产生的输出,深度由收敛而非预设决定,层间角色在训练中自发涌现分化。

🎯 背景

现有自改进 LLM agent 只打磨答案,不打磨产生答案的过程。加一个元层级的系统会把这个层级本身固定住;能自我编辑的系统则必须保留一部分不可变的编辑机制才能维持稳定——这两种限制都把可实现的元深度压在大约 2 层。

🔬 方法

Meta$^n$ 保持元操作 Ω 本身固定不变,但让它递归作用于自己的输入:Ω 反复读取下层求解器栈留下的轨迹,以及产生这些轨迹的代码,然后把下一层写成一个策略性预处理步骤加一个可调用的 helper 库。因为 Ω 从不改变,它不会破坏系统稳定性;又因为它的输入严格递增,每一层都能站在比上一层更高的视角推理。深度由收敛条件决定而非预先设定,进化档案(evolutionary archive)负责搜索不同的层链组合。

📊 结果

在两个不同的基座模型上,Meta$^n$ 在全部 8 个基准家族上都超过此前的自改进 agent。最突出的是专门设计来抵抗"技能记忆化"的 ARC-AGI-2,Meta$^n$ 是唯一得分高于零的方法。消融实验表明大部分增益来自层与层之间传递的 conditioning,且不同层会自发分化出不同角色,尽管没有任何 prompt 事先规定这一点。

原文摘要

▶ Abstract
Self-improving LLM agents refine answers, not the process that produces those answers. Systems that add a meta-level hold that level fixed, and those that edit themselves must leave part of their own editing machinery untouched to stay stable, capping the meta-depth they realize at roughly two. We present Meta$^n$, which keeps the meta-operation fixed and recurses on its input instead. That operation, $\Omega$, is applied repeatedly to its own products, reading the traces of the solver stack below together with the code that produced them, then writing the next layer as a strategic pre-process and a library of callable helpers. Because $\Omega$ never changes, it cannot destabilize the system, and because its input strictly grows, each layer reasons from a higher vantage than the last. Depth is set by convergence rather than fixed in advance, and an evolutionary archive searches over layer chains. Across two backbones, Meta$^n$ outperforms prior self-improving agents on all eight benchmark families. The sharpest case is ARC-AGI-2, built to resist skill memorization, where it alone scores above zero. Ablations indicate that most of the gain from recursion comes from the conditioning each layer passes to the next, and distinct layer roles emerge with depth although no prompt prescribes them. Code available at this https URL
来源: arXiv:2608.24735 · 精读由高松灯生成,基于摘要与 arXiv 页面信息