about
SIA: Self Improving AI with Harness and Weight Updates (arxiv.org)
3 points by mitchwainer 128 days ago | hide | past | pdf | discuss on HN

In plain words: An AI agent critiques its own task results, then rewrites its tools and prompts and updates its weights from feedback. Updating both beat only rewriting the setup on all three tests, scoring 25% above the best prior system at legal charge classification.

Abstract · SIA: Self Improving AI with Harness & Weight Updates

Humans are the bottleneck in building and improving AI. Both the models and the agents that wrap them are written, tuned, and corrected by people. The long-horizon goal of an AI that can figure out how to improve itself remains open. Two largely disjoint research lines attack this bottleneck. The harness-update school has a meta-agent rewrite the scaffold of a task-specific agent (its tools, prompts, retry logic, and search procedure) while the model weights are held fixed. The test-time training school uses hand-written RL pipelines to update the model's own weights on task feedback while the harness is held fixed. These two silos operate in isolation. We propose SIA, a self-improving loop in which a language-model agent (the Feedback-Agent) updates both the harness and the weights of a task-specific agent. We evaluate across three contrasting domains: Chinese legal charge classification, low-level GPU kernel optimisation, and single-cell RNA denoising. Combining both levers outperforms scaffold iteration alone on all three benchmarks. SIA-W+H achieves 25.1% over prior SOTA on LawBench, 12.4% faster GPU kernels than prior SOTA (1,017 vs 1,161 μs), and 20.4% over prior SOTA on denoising. Harness updates make the model agentic, shaping how it searches and acts, while weight updates build the domain intuition that no prompt or scaffold can instil.

Prannay Hebbar, Yogendra Manawat, Samuel Verboomen, Alesia Ivanova, Selvam Palanimalai, Kunal Bhatia, Vignesh Baskaran
arXiv:2605.27276 · cs.AI, cs.CL · submitted May 26, 2026 · updated May 28, 2026
abstract · pdf · html

add comment on HN