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Self-Evolving Embodied Agents via Skill-Harness Evolution

arxiv.org/abs/2608.11350

quality89

Updated 2 h ago · first seen 11 Sept 2026

paper_01M294G63MYNYQVDFVFZ2EGRQE

Published
11 Sept 2026
T1 · 2 h ago
arXiv
2608.11350
T1 · 2 h ago
Category
cs.CL
T1 · 2 h ago

Abstract

Embodied agents are increasingly built as systems around foundation models, where performance depends not only on model weights but also on the skills, context, action interfaces, and execution harness surrounding the model. While supervised fine-tuning and reinforcement learning can adapt agents to new environments, they require additional data, rewards, and training runs; meanwhile, many train-free code-centric approaches rely on programmable robot APIs that may be unavailable in fixed-interface settings. We propose SHAPER, a self-evolving framework for train-free embodied adaptation that keeps model parameters frozen and improves the non-parametric agent system by evolving reusable skills and a context-code harness through target-environment rollouts. In SHAPER, the same frozen model can serve as both planner and optimizer, refining its external skills and context-code harness without parameter updates. We evaluate SHAPER on VLABench and ESI-Bench, covering embodied agents with different low-level action interfaces, and compare against pure execution, supervised fine-tuning, and test-time-scaling baselines such as verifier-free selection and voting. Our results suggest that skill-and-harness optimization is a practical route to self-evolving embodied agents when model training is expensive, unavailable, or undesirable.

Authors 10

Peidong Wang, Zhiming Ma, Ying Chang, Xufang Luo, Yiqun Zhang, Zihan Wang, Xiaocui Yang, Shi Feng, Yuqing Yang, Dongsheng Li

Specification

Official page

Source:arXiv (Atom API + RSS)T1observed 2 h agohigh

Arxiv announce type
replace

Source:arXiv (Atom API + RSS)T1observed 2 h agohigh

arXiv id
2608.11350

Source:arXiv (Atom API + RSS)T1observed 2 h agohigh

Categories
cs.CL, cs.RO

Source:arXiv (Atom API + RSS)T1observed 2 h agohigh

PDF

Source:arXiv (Atom API + RSS)T1observed 2 h agohigh

Primary category
cs.CL

Source:arXiv (Atom API + RSS)T1observed 2 h agohigh

Published
11 Sept 2026

Source:arXiv (Atom API + RSS)T1observed 2 h agohigh

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Provenance

Attributed facts

9

Source tiers

T19

Freshest observation

2 h ago

Conflicts

None