Author name cluster

Yiran Wu

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4 papers

2 author rows

TMLR Journal 2026 Journal Article

A Survey of Self-Evolving Agents: What, When, How, and Where to Evolve on the Path to Artificial Super Intelligence

Huan-ang Gao
Jiayi Geng
Wenyue Hua
Mengkang Hu
Xinzhe Juan
Hongzhang Liu
Shilong Liu
Jiahao Qiu

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities across diverse tasks but remain fundamentally static, unable to adapt their internal parameters to novel tasks, evolving knowledge domains, or dynamic interaction contexts. As LLMs are increasingly deployed in open-ended, interactive environments, this static nature has become a critical bottleneck, necessitating agents that can adaptively reason, act, and evolve in real time. This paradigm shift ---from scaling static models to developing self-evolving agents --- has sparked growing interest in architectures and methods enabling continual learning and adaptation from data, interactions, and experiences. This survey provides the first systematic and comprehensive review of self-evolving agents, organizing the field around three foundational dimensions --- what to evolve, when to evolve, and how to evolve. We examine evolutionary mechanisms across agent components (e.g., models, memory, tools, architecture), categorize adaptation methods by stages (e.g., intra-test-time, inter-test-time), and analyze the algorithmic and architectural designs that guide evolutionary adaptation (e.g., scalar rewards, textual feedback, single-agent and multi-agent systems). Additionally, we analyze evaluation metrics and benchmarks tailored for self-evolving agents, highlight applications in domains such as coding, education, and healthcare, and identify critical challenges and research directions in safety, scalability, and co-evolutionary dynamics. By providing a structured framework for understanding and designing self-evolving agents, this survey establishes a roadmap for advancing more adaptive, capable, robust, and versatile agentic systems in both research and real-world deployments, and ultimately sheds light on the realization of Artificial Super Intelligence (ASI) where agents evolve autonomously and perform beyond human-level intelligence across a wide array of tasks.

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NeurIPS Conference 2025 Conference Paper

Absolute Zero: Reinforced Self-play Reasoning with Zero Data

Andrew Zhao
Yiran Wu
Tong Wu
Quentin Xu
Yang Yue
Matthieu Lin
Shenzhi Wang
Qingyun Wu

Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) has shown promise in enhancing the reasoning capabilities of large language models by learning directly from rule-based outcome rewards. Recent RLVR works that operate under the zero setting avoid supervision in labeling the reasoning process, but still depend on manually curated collections of questions and answers for training. The scarcity of high-quality, human-produced examples raises concerns about the long-term scalability of relying on human supervision, a challenge already evident in the domain of language model pretraining. Furthermore, in a hypothetical future where AI surpasses human intelligence, tasks provided by humans may offer limited learning potential for a superintelligent system. To address these concerns, we propose a new RLVR paradigm called Absolute Zero, in which a single model learns to propose tasks that maximize its own learning progress and improves reasoning by solving them, without relying on any external human or distillation data. Under this paradigm, we introduce the Absolute Zero Reasoner (AZR), a system that self-evolves its training curriculum and reasoning ability. AZR uses a code executor to both validate self-proposed code reasoning tasks and verify answers, serving as an unified source of verifiable feedback to guide open-ended yet grounded learning. Despite being trained entirely without external data, AZR achieves overall SOTA performance on coding and mathematical reasoning tasks, outperforming existing zero-setting models that rely on tens of thousands of in-domain human-curated examples. Furthermore, we demonstrate that AZR can be effectively applied across different model scales and is compatible with various model classes.

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NeurIPS Conference 2023 Conference Paper

Unified Off-Policy Learning to Rank: a Reinforcement Learning Perspective

Zeyu Zhang
Yi Su
Hui Yuan
Yiran Wu
Rishab Balasubramanian
Qingyun Wu
Huazheng Wang
Mengdi Wang

Off-policy Learning to Rank (LTR) aims to optimize a ranker from data collected by a deployed logging policy. However, existing off-policy learning to rank methods often make strong assumptions about how users generate the click data, i. e. , the click model, and hence need to tailor their methods specifically under different click models. In this paper, we unified the ranking process under general stochastic click models as a Markov Decision Process (MDP), and the optimal ranking could be learned with offline reinforcement learning (RL) directly. Building upon this, we leverage offline RL techniques for off-policy LTR and propose the Click Model-Agnostic Unified Off-policy Learning to Rank (CUOLR) method, which could be easily applied to a wide range of click models. Through a dedicated formulation of the MDP, we show that offline RL algorithms can adapt to various click models without complex debiasing techniques and prior knowledge of the model. Results on various large-scale datasets demonstrate that CUOLR consistently outperforms the state-of-the-art off-policy learning to rank algorithms while maintaining consistency and robustness under different click models.

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ICML Conference 2022 Conference Paper

Improving Policy Optimization with Generalist-Specialist Learning

Zhiwei Jia
Xuanlin Li
Zhan Ling
Shuang Liu
Yiran Wu
Hao Su 0001

Generalization in deep reinforcement learning over unseen environment variations usually requires policy learning over a large set of diverse training variations. We empirically observe that an agent trained on many variations (a generalist) tends to learn faster at the beginning, yet its performance plateaus at a less optimal level for a long time. In contrast, an agent trained only on a few variations (a specialist) can often achieve high returns under a limited computational budget. To have the best of both worlds, we propose a novel generalist-specialist training framework. Specifically, we first train a generalist on all environment variations; when it fails to improve, we launch a large population of specialists with weights cloned from the generalist, each trained to master a selected small subset of variations. We finally resume the training of the generalist with auxiliary rewards induced by demonstrations of all specialists. In particular, we investigate the timing to start specialist training and compare strategies to learn generalists with assistance from specialists. We show that this framework pushes the envelope of policy learning on several challenging and popular benchmarks including Procgen, Meta-World and ManiSkill.

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