Jun Nie, Yonggang Zhang, Qianshu Cai, Yiu-ming Cheung, Xinmei Tian, Bo Han
An LLM agent can acquire persistent improvements by evolving its harness---the executable program governing model calls, tool use, verification, and recovery---without updating model weights. When the same harness serves users with different workloads, isolated evolution limits the sharing of useful discoveries, while centralized adaptation can introduce conflicting task-specific changes. We introduce EvolveNet, a framework for collaborative harness evolution that connects local specialization with shared capability accumulation. Clients evolve the same broadcast harness on their local workloads in parallel, and a server composes their adaptations into an updated shared program. Redistribution makes accepted discoveries available to all clients, allowing subsequent local evolution to build on improvements accumulated across the collaboration. EvolveNet supports this process through evidence-guided, scope-typed program aggregation and behavioral validation. Our theoretical analysis provides sufficient conditions for retaining and combining complementary improvements despite program interactions. Experiments across five settings show improved shared-harness performance, with ablation and behavioral analyses supporting the contribution of composition beyond specialist selection alone.
Time-series models are increasingly deployed in operational systems (e.g., inventory management and clinical care) where predictions trigger interventions that alter future observations, producing records we term AI-shaped trajectories. This sequence-prediction coupling deepens as such systems evolve into agents that autonomously predict, act, and remember across long horizons. Such AI-shaped trajectories support immediate performance monitoring, but turn ambiguous once reused as passive data. An algorithm may then misread a prediction-prevented stockout as naturally stable demand, or an averted medical crisis as a false alarm. This ambiguity then propagates into everything built on the record, from retraining and agent memory to downstream predictive tasks. As a result, systems may internalize these intervention effects as natural phenomena, drifting further from the truth at every closed-loop cycle. In this Blue Sky paper, we advocate an agenda for reflexive time-series analysis that shifts the analytical object from the intervention-agnostic sequence to the prediction-action-observation loop. The agenda requires closed-loop provenance to track the operational context (e.g., predictions, policies, and actions), sequence identification to estimate how those actions affect future values under explicit causal assumptions, and closed-loop evaluation to separate intrinsic process prediction from policy-driven effects. This foundation is essential for integrating autonomous agents into such loops at scale, enabling the joint learning of intervention effects and intrinsic dynamics for robust temporal representations.