ACL 2025long0 citations

Gödel Agent: A Self-Referential Agent Framework for Recursively Self-Improvement

Xunjian Yin, Xinyi Wang, Liangming Pan, Li Lin, Xiaojun Wan, William Yang Wang

Abstract

The rapid advancement of large language models (LLMs) has significantly enhanced the capabilities of agents across various tasks. However, existing agentic systems, whether based on fixed pipeline algorithms or pre-defined meta-learning frameworks, cannot search the whole agent design space due to the restriction of human-designed components, and thus might miss the more optimal agent design. In this paper, we introduce Gödel Agent, a self-evolving framework inspired by the Gödel Machine, enabling agents to recursively improve themselves without relying on predefined routines or fixed optimization algorithms. Gödel Agent leverages LLMs to dynamically modify its own logic and behavior, guided solely by high-level objectives through prompting. Experimental results on multiple domains demonstrate that the implementation of Gödel Agent can achieve continuous self-improvement, surpassing manually crafted agents in performance, efficiency, and generalizability.

BibTeX
@inproceedings{yin-etal-2025-godel,
    title = {G{\"o}del Agent: A Self-Referential Agent Framework for Recursively Self-Improvement},
    author = "Yin, Xunjian  and
      Wang, Xinyi  and
      Pan, Liangming  and
      Lin, Li  and
      Wan, Xiaojun  and
      Wang, William Yang",
    editor = "Che, Wanxiang  and
      Nabende, Joyce  and
      Shutova, Ekaterina  and
      Pilehvar, Mohammad Taher",
    booktitle = "Proceedings of the 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)",
    month = jul,
    year = "2025",
    address = "Vienna, Austria",
    publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
    url = "https://aclanthology.org/2025.acl-long.1354/",
    doi = "10.18653/v1/2025.acl-long.1354",
    pages = "27890--27913",
    ISBN = "979-8-89176-251-0"
}