A Comprehensive Survey of Self-Evolving AI Agents: A New Paradigm Bridging Foundation Models and Lifelong Agentic Systems
Jinyuan Fang, Yanwen Peng, Xi Zhang, Yingxu Wang, Xinhao Yi, Guibin Zhang, Yi Xu, Bin Wu, Siwei Liu, Zihao Li, Zhaochun Ren, Nikos Aletras, Xi Wang, Han Zhou, Zaiqiao Meng
2025-08-12

Summary
This paper talks about self-evolving AI agents, which are special kinds of AI systems that can improve and adapt themselves automatically by learning from their experiences and feedback in changing environments. It surveys the different ways these agents can update their models, memories, tools, and even their own structures to become better over time.
What's the problem?
The problem is that most AI systems are fixed once they are created and don't change on their own when facing new tasks or situations. This limits their usefulness in real-world settings that keep changing and need ongoing learning to stay effective. It’s hard for AI to adapt continuously without human help.
What's the solution?
The paper explains how self-evolving AI agents work by constantly improving themselves through different methods such as learning from rewards, copying good examples, and evolving like species in nature. These agents can change parts of their own design, create new tools, adjust their memory or strategies, and refine how they solve problems based on what they experience during use.
Why it matters?
This matters because self-evolving AI agents can become much smarter and more helpful in everyday situations by learning and adapting on their own. They could lead to AI systems that work better in complex, unpredictable environments, making technology more powerful, efficient, and able to assist humans in more advanced ways without needing constant updates from people.
Abstract
A survey of self-evolving AI agents that adapt to dynamic environments through automatic enhancement based on interaction data and feedback.