Does Failure Feedback Direct Agent Self-Modification?
Self-improving agents use failure feedback to revise their code or instructions, but gains after selection do not establish target-specific repair or generalization.
ProofPaper ↗
Key points
- We measure directedness by comparing repair of a randomly selected target failure with repair of the parent's other failures.
- Across 145 eligible modifications in public Darwin Gödel Machine logs, we find no detectable target-specific advantage.
- Controlled instruction-revision experiments with small open models show that relevant feedback can improve target repair.
- In a second study with a pre-specified analysis plan, target feedback raised repair by 20 percentage points for Qwen3-4B relative to matched same-category feedback; the 7-point increase for Phi-4-mini was not significant.
Sources (1)
- [1]Does Failure Feedback Direct Agent Self-Modification?arXiv (AI, ML, NLP, CV, robotics, multi-agent) · Oct 10, 07:19 AM
Self-improving agents use failure feedback to revise their code or instructions, but gains after selection do not establish target-specific repair or generalization.
We measure directedness by comparing repair of a randomly selected target failure with repair of the parent's other failures.
Extractive summary: sentences quoted from the sources.
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