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True self-evolution requires agents to act as lifelong learners that internalize novel experiences to solve future problems. However, rigorously measuring this foundational capability is hindered by two obstacles: the entanglement of prior…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-12 Jiarui Yuan , Tailin Jin , Weize Chen , Zeyuan Liu

Central to many self-improvement pipelines for large language models (LLMs) is the assumption that models can improve by reflecting on past mistakes. We study a phenomenon termed contextual drag: the presence of failed attempts in the…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-03-04 Yun Cheng , Xingyu Zhu , Haoyu Zhao , Sanjeev Arora

Compressing Large Language Models (LLMs) often leads to reduced performance, especially for knowledge-intensive tasks. In this work, we dive into how compression damages LLMs' inherent knowledge and the possible remedies. We start by…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-02-19 Duc N. M Hoang , Minsik Cho , Thomas Merth , Mohammad Rastegari , Zhangyang Wang

Research progress in AutoML has lead to state of the art solutions that can cope quite wellwith supervised learning task, e.g., classification with AutoSklearn. However, so far thesesystems do not take into account the changing nature of…

Post-training large language models (LLMs) often suffers from catastrophic forgetting, where improvements on a target objective degrade previously acquired capabilities. Recent evidence suggests that this phenomenon is primarily driven by…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-07 Xinyu Wang , Changzhi Sun , Yuanbin Wu , Xiaoling Wang

The accelerating adoption of language models (LMs) as agents for deployment in long-context tasks motivates a thorough understanding of goal drift: agents' tendency to deviate from an original objective. While prior-generation language…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-03-04 Achyutha Menon , Magnus Saebo , Tyler Crosse , Spencer Gibson , Eyon Jang , Diogo Cruz

As reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) has become the dominant paradigm for scaling reasoning capabilities in LLMs, a new failure mode emerges: LLMs gaming verifiers. We study this phenomenon on inductive reasoning tasks,…

This paper investigates the potentials of Large Language Models (LLMs) as adaptive tutors in the context of second-language learning. In particular, we evaluate whether system prompting can reliably constrain LLMs to generate only text…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-06-10 Mina Almasi , Ross Deans Kristensen-McLachlan

Multi-Agentic AI systems, powered by large language models (LLMs), are inherently non-deterministic and prone to silent failures such as drift, cycles, and missing details in outputs, which are difficult to detect. We introduce the task of…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-11-07 Divya Pathak , Harshit Kumar , Anuska Roy , Felix George , Mudit Verma , Pratibha Moogi

Humans do not just find mistakes after the fact -- we often catch them mid-stream because 'reflection' is tied to the goal and its constraints. Today's large language models produce reasoning tokens and 'reflective' text, but is it…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-10-24 Sion Weatherhead , Flora Salim , Aaron Belbasis

Model collapse, the progressive degradation of LLMs trained on their own outputs, has been characterized statistically but lacks a linguistic explanation for which structures degrade, in what order, and why. We show that iterated learning…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-25 Dongxin Guo , Jikun Wu , Siu Ming Yiu

Agentic LLM frameworks promise autonomous behavior via task decomposition, tool use, and iterative planning, but most deployed systems remain brittle. They lack runtime introspection, cannot diagnose their own failure modes, and do not…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-12-10 Christopher Cruz

Operating LLMs as coordinated multi-agent research systems over multi-hour runs surfaces failure modes that single-shot evaluation cannot: upstream providers throttle without warning, sub-agents drift the task to fit accessible tools,…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-05-26 Sasank Annapureddy

Deep reinforcement learning (DRL) is increasingly applied in large-scale productions like Netflix and Facebook. As with most data-driven systems, DRL systems can exhibit undesirable behaviors due to environmental drifts, which often occur…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-08-25 Ahmed Haj Yahmed , Rached Bouchoucha , Houssem Ben Braiek , Foutse Khomh

Large language models (LLMs) make it plausible to build systems that improve through self-evolving loops, but many existing proposals are better understood as self-play and often plateau quickly. A central failure mode is that the loop…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-19 Wei Liu , Siya Qi , Yali Du , Yulan He

Online Continual Learning (OCL) empowers machine learning models to acquire new knowledge online across a sequence of tasks. However, OCL faces a significant challenge: catastrophic forgetting, wherein the model learned in previous tasks is…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-05-16 Fan Lyu , Daofeng Liu , Linglan Zhao , Zhang Zhang , Fanhua Shang , Fuyuan Hu , Wei Feng , Liang Wang

Large language model (LLM) agents are increasingly used for complex tasks, yet deployed agents often remain static, failing to adapt as user needs evolve. This creates a tension between the need for continuous service and the necessity of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-19 Peng Xia , Jianwen Chen , Xinyu Yang , Haoqin Tu , Jiaqi Liu , Kaiwen Xiong , Siwei Han , Shi Qiu , Haonian Ji , Yuyin Zhou , Zeyu Zheng , Cihang Xie , Huaxiu Yao

Fine-tuning Large Language Models (LLMs) on specific datasets is a common practice to improve performance on target tasks. However, this performance gain often leads to overfitting, where the model becomes too specialized in either the task…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-09-10 Sonam Gupta , Yatin Nandwani , Asaf Yehudai , Mayank Mishra , Gaurav Pandey , Dinesh Raghu , Sachindra Joshi

Learning systems are typically optimized by minimizing loss or maximizing reward, assuming that improvements in these signals reflect progress toward the true objective. However, when feedback reliability is unobservable, this assumption…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-24 Zhipeng Zhang , Zhenjie Yao , Kai Li , Lei Yang

Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) enables large language models to acquire slow, multi-step reasoning from sparse final-answer signals. We provide a statistical-physics picture of this emergence. We show that an…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-05-08 Sihan Hu , Xiansheng Cai , Yuan Huang , Zhiyuan Yao , Linfeng Zhang , Pan Zhang , Youjin Deng , Kun Chen