New agent framework matches human-engineered AI systems — and adds zero inference cost to deploy

Agents built on top of today's models often break with simple changes — a new library, a workflow modification — and require a human engineer to fix it. That's one of the most persistent challenges in deploying AI for the enterprise: creating agents that can adapt to dynamic environments without constant hand-holding. While today's models are powerful, they are largely static.

To address this, researchers at the University of California, Santa Barbara have developed Group-Evolving Agents (GEA), a new framework that enables groups of AI agents to evolve together, sharing experiences and reusing their innovations to autonomously improve over time.

In experiments on complex coding and software engineering tasks, GEA substantially outperformed existing self-improving frameworks. Perhaps most notably for enterprise decision-makers, the system autonomously evolved agents that matched or exceeded the performance of frameworks painstakingly designed by human experts.

The limitations of 'lone wolf' evolution

Most existing agentic AI systems rely on fixed architectures designed by engineers. These systems often struggle to move beyond the capability boundaries imposed by their initial designs.

To solve this, researchers have long sought to create self-evolving agents that can autonomously modify their own code and structure to overcome their initial limits. This capability is essential for handling open-ended environments where the agent must continuously explore new solutions.

However, current approaches to self-evolution have a major structural flaw. As the researchers note in their paper, most systems are inspired by biological evolution and are designed around "individual-centric" processes. These methods typically use a tree-structured approach: a single "parent" agent is selected to produce offspring, creating distinct evolutionary branches that remain strictly isolated from one another.

This isolation creates a silo effect. An agent in one branch cannot access the data, tools, or workflows discovered by an agent in a parallel branch. If a specific lineage fails to be selected for the next generation, any valuable discovery made by that agent, such as a novel debugging tool or a more efficient testing workflow, dies out with it.

In their paper, the researchers question the necessity of adhering to this biological metaphor. "AI agents are not biological individuals," they argue. "Why should their evolution remain constrained by biological paradigms?"

The collective intelligence of Group-Evolving Agents

GEA shifts the paradigm by treating a group of agents, rather than an individual, as the fundamental unit of evolution.

The process begins by selecting a group of parent agents from an existing archive. To ensure a healthy mix of stability and innovation, GEA selects these agents based on a combined score of performance (competence in solving tasks) and novelty (how distinct their capabilities are from others).

Unlike traditional systems where an agent only learns from its direct parent, GEA creates a shared pool of collective experience. This pool contains the evolutionary traces from all members of the parent group, including code modifications, successful solutions to tasks, and tool invocation histories. Every agent in the group gains access to this collective history, allowing them to learn from the breakthroughs and mistakes of their peers.

A “Reflection Module,” powered by a large language model, analyzes this collective history to identify group-wide patterns. For instance, if one agent discovers a high-performing debugging tool while another perfects a testing workflow, the system extracts both insights. Based on this analysis, the system generates high-level "evolution directives" that guide the creation of the child group. This ensures the next generation possesses the combined strengths of all their parents, rather than just the traits of a single lineage.

However, this hive-mind approach works best when success is objective, such as in coding tasks. "For less deterministic domains (e.g., creative generation), evaluation signals are weaker," Zhaotian Weng and Xin Eric Wang, co-authors of the paper, told VentureBeat in written comments. "Blindly sharing outputs and experiences may introduce low-quality experiences that act as noise. This suggests the need for stronger experience filtering mechanisms" for subjective tasks.

GEA in action

The researchers tested GEA against the current state-of-the-art self-evolving baseline, the Darwin Godel Machine (DGM), on two rigorous benchmarks. The results demonstrated a massive leap in capability without increasing the number of agents used.

This collaborative approach also makes the system more robust against failure. In their experiments, the researchers intentionally broke agents by manually injecting bugs into their implementations. GEA was able to repair these critical bugs in an average of 1.4 iterations, while the baseline took 5 iterations. The system effectively leverages the "healthy" members of the group to diagnose and patch the compromised ones.

On SWE-bench Verified, a benchmark consisting of real GitHub issues including bugs and feature requests, GEA achieved a 71.0% success rate, compared to the baseline's 56.7%. This translates to a significant boost in autonomous engineering throughput, meaning the agents are far more capable of handling real-world software maintenance. Similarly, on Polyglot, which tests code generation across diverse programming languages, GEA achieved 88.3% against the baseline's 68.3%, indicating high adaptability to different tech stacks.

For enterprise R&D teams, the most critical finding is that GEA allows AI to design itself as effectively as human engineers. On SWE-bench, GEA’s 71.0% success rate effectively matches the performance of OpenHands, the top human-designed open-source framework. On Polyglot, GEA significantly outperformed Aider, a popular coding assistant, which achieved 52.0%. This suggests that organizations may eventually reduce their reliance on large teams of prompt engineers to tweak agent frameworks, as the agents can meta-learn these optimizations autonomously.

This efficiency extends to cost management. "GEA is explicitly a two-stage system: (1) agent evolution, then (2) inference/deployment," the researchers said. "After evolution, you deploy a single evolved agent… so enterprise inference cost is essentially unchanged versus a standard single-agent setup."

The success of GEA stems largely from its ability to consolidate improvements. The researchers tracked specific innovations invented by the agents during the evolutionary process. In the baseline approach, valuable tools often appeared in isolated branches but failed to propagate because those specific lineages ended. In GEA, the shared experience model ensured these tools were adopted by the best-performing agents. The top GEA agent integrated traits from 17 unique ancestors (representing 28% of the population) whereas the best baseline agent integrated traits from only 9. In effect, GEA creates a "super-employee" that possesses the combined best practices of the entire group.

"A GEA-inspired workflow in production would allow agents to first attempt a few independent fixes when failures occur," the researchers explained regarding this self-healing capability. "A reflection agent (typically powered by a strong foundation model) can then summarize the outcomes… and guide a more comprehensive system update."

Furthermore, the improvements discovered by GEA are not tied to a specific underlying model. Agents evolved using one model, such as Claude, maintained their performance gains even when the underlying engine was swapped to another model family, such as GPT-5.1 or GPT-o3-mini. This transferability offers enterprises the flexibility to switch model providers without losing the custom architectural optimizations their agents have learned.

For industries with strict compliance requirements, the idea of self-modifying code might sound risky. To address this, the authors said: "We expect enterprise deployments to include non-evolvable guardrails, such as sandboxed execution, policy constraints, and verification layers."

While the researchers plan to release the official code soon, developers can already begin implementing the GEA architecture conceptually on top of existing agent frameworks. The system requires three key additions to a standard agent stack: an “experience archive” to store evolutionary traces, a “reflection module” to analyze group patterns, and an “updating module” that allows the agent to modify its own code based on those insights.

Looking ahead, the framework could democratize advanced agent development. "One promising direction is hybrid evolution pipelines," the researchers said, "where smaller models explore early to accumulate diverse experiences, and stronger models later guide evolution using those experiences."