Self-improving AI / RRSI (Regularized Recursive Self-Improvement)
RRSI (Regularized Recursive Self-Improvement)
“We introduce Regularized Recursive Self-Improvement of Agent Harnesses (RRSI), which incorporates the principles of regularizations into harness self-improvement by constraining the evolution candidate proposal and selection.”
RRSI (Regularized Recursive Self-Improvement) is one of the projects on the self-improving AI map. Below is what it changes about itself, whether the change lasts, and whether it improves the improver, each with the line from its own source.
Where it sits
Columns: what it changes, from the surface to the deepest change. Rows: whether the change outlasts the run. A number is how many projects sit in that square. See it on the 3D map
- What it changes
- Tools, harness, its own code“Prompts, control flow, configuration, context management, tools, skills, memory and sub-agents may all be modified”
- Does the change last
- Saved for later runs“accepting one fast-forwards the branch, so the incumbent is always a commit”
- Does it improve the improver
- improves the task agent; no evidence the improver got better“The proposer, the analyst that writes the cross-round failure feedback and the leakage critic are all Claude Opus 4.8.”
- Who sets the goals
- people set tasks and scoring“In each domain the harness is evolved on a single suite”
- How it was tested
- tested on held-out tasks“In each domain the harness is evolved on a single suite, and is then run unchanged on held-out benchmarks.”
The harness around a frozen model is what changes. The paper does not describe the proposer, analyst or critic being edited by the loop. Persistence set to saved: accepted harnesses are kept as commits, and the system that edits them stays the same.
Does it count as RSI?
It depends on the definition. Under the four used on What counts as RSI, by what its own source says:
- Loose (Eliezer Yudkowsky, Intelligence Explosion Microeconomics (2013)): counts
- Durable (Ren et al., self-improvement survey (2026)): counts
- Strict (Roman Yampolskiy, From Seed AI to Technological Singularity (2015)): does not count
- Autonomous (Anthropic, When AI builds itself): does not count
How it got here
Earlier work in this catalog that RRSI cites, oldest first. Under each: where that work sits on the map, then where RRSI sits (changes in bold), and what RRSI's own paper says about it. Its whole family on the citation map
Cites Darwin Gödel Machine 2025, Hyperagents 2026, Recursive Harness Self-Improvement 2026
Cited by ECG-RSI 2026, Self-HPO 2026, Organon 2026, RSI Arena 2026, ParetoRSI-Gym 2026, Pu, recursive self-improvement 2026