PAST-Bench: Benchmarking the Foundations of Recursive Self-Improvement in Personal Agents

arXiv:2608.04003 · cs.CL · Submitted 2026-08-04 · Read on arXiv

Shuhan Xue, Zixin Ding, Yichen Shen, Yinjie Wang, Zhenfei Yin, Yingcheng Wu, Yuxin Chen, Mengdi Wang, Ling Yang

cs.CL

Submitted: 2026-08-04

Comments: Code: https://github.com/Gen-Verse/PAST-Bench

Code: https://github.com/Gen-Verse/PAST-Bench

License: http://arxiv.org/licenses/nonexclusive-distrib/1.0/

Terminology

• Benchmark — 50× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• Benchmarking — 41× in this paper · explained in 3 episodes
• Trace — 34× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• Ablation — 13× in this paper · explained in 1 episode
• AI Agents — 7× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• LLM judge — 7× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• Aggregation — 5× in this paper · explained in 1 episode
• Self-Evolving Agents — 5× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• Accuracy — 3× in this paper · explained in 1 episode
• Adaptation — 3× in this paper · explained in 1 episode
• Agent Skills — 3× in this paper · explained in 1 episode
• Agent Architectures — 2× in this paper · explained in 1 episode
• Alignment — 2× in this paper · explained in 1 episode
• Generalization — 2× in this paper · explained in 13 episodes
• Robustness — 2× in this paper · explained in 5 episodes
• Abstention — 1× in this paper · explained in 1 episode
• Abstraction — 1× in this paper · explained in 1 episode
• Adaptive Mechanism — 1× in this paper · explained in 1 episode
• Agent Memory — 1× in this paper · explained in 1 episode
• Agentic Framework — 1× in this paper · explained in 6 episodes
• Agentic Retrieval — 1× in this paper · explained in 1 episode
• Agentic Search — 1× in this paper · explained in 1 episode
• Agentic System — 1× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• Calibration — 1× in this paper · explained in 7 episodes
• Consistency — 1× in this paper · explained in 3 episodes
• Core — 1× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• Cross-Model Transfer — 1× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• Domain Shift — 1× in this paper · explained in 4 episodes
• Foundation Model — 1× in this paper · explained in 3 episodes
• Foundation Models — 1× in this paper · explained in 7 episodes
• Generative AI — 1× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• In-Context Learning — 1× in this paper · explained in 4 episodes
• Introspection — 1× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• Knowledge Graph — 1× in this paper · explained in 7 episodes
• Knowledge graphs — 1× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• Multi-agent Collaborative Framework — 1× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• Redundancy — 1× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• Reinforcement Learning — 1× in this paper · explained in 4 episodes

Sources

• AgentArch: A Comprehensive Benchmark to Evaluate Agent Architectures in Enterprise
• A Comprehensive Survey of Self-Evolving AI Agents: A New Paradigm Bridging Foundation Models and Lifelong Agentic Systems
• A Survey of Self-Evolving Agents: What, When, How, and Where to Evolve on the Path to Artificial Super Intelligence
• From Raw Experience to Skill Consumption: A Systematic Study of Model-Generated Agent Skills
• Recursive Harness Self-Improvement
• SkillsBench: Benchmarking How Well Agent Skills Work Across Diverse Tasks
• ATBench: A Diverse and Realistic Agent Trajectory Benchmark for Safety Evaluation and Diagnosis
• Beyond Semantic Similarity: Rethinking Retrieval for Agentic Search via Direct Corpus Interaction
• MUSE-Autoskill: Self-Evolving Agents via Skill Creation, Memory, Management, and Evaluation
• SkillOS: Learning Skill Curation for Self-Evolving Agents
• Self-Improvements in Modern Agentic Systems: A Survey
• OpenClaw-RL: Train Any Agent Simply by Talking
• Evo-Memory: Benchmarking LLM Agent Test-time Learning with Self-Evolving Memory
• SkillOpt: Executive Strategy for Self-Evolving Agent Skills
• MemRL: Self-Evolving Agents via Runtime Reinforcement Learning on Episodic Memory
• ClawBench: Can AI Agents Complete Everyday Online Tasks?
• LifelongAgentBench: Evaluating LLM Agents as Lifelong Learners

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