OASIS: Online Anchor-calibrated Self-Improvement System

Wenyi Wang, Firas Laakom, Li Nanbo, Yanning Dai, Yuhui Wang, Yifan Xu, Dmitrii Khizbullin, Piotr Piękos, Yilan Zhang, Yimeng Chen, Alfonso Amayuelas, Mingchen Zhuge, Jürgen Schmidhuber


Abstract
Many recursively self-improving systems improve by editing their codebases based on observed rollout behavior. However, recent methods largely treat self-improvement as offline search: variants are optimized and evaluated on fixed benchmarks. This misaligns with real-world deployment, where tasks arrive sequentially and may have different distributions. We study recursive self-improvement as online learning over non-stationary task streams. In this setting, reliable execution and fallback are particularly difficult with limited evidence: different branches of self-improvement see different tasks, so raw rewards conflate capability with task difficulty, leading to overly conservative or optimistic reversion. We propose Online Anchor-calibrated Self-Improvement System (OASIS) that runs an adaptive reference agent on incoming tasks, converts raw rewards into paired comparisons, and uses confidence-calibrated rules for branch continuation and fallback without evaluating every agent on all tasks. Across SWE-Bench Pro and DeepResearch Bench, OASIS consistently improves over both the initial agent and prior RSI baseline SSA, raising the SWE-Bench Pro solve rate from 51.6% to 56.9% using Qwen3.6-35B-A3B and DeepResearch Bench from 35.18 to 39.31 using Gemini 3 Flash. This enables OASIS to outperform larger open weights and proprietary systems, including Qwen3.5-397B-A17B, Minimax 2.7, Qwen3.6-Plus, and GPT-5.3-Codex, with sustained deep self-improvements rather than shallow cycles.
Anthology ID:
2026.findings-emnlp.2150
Volume:
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2026
Month:
October
Year:
2026
Address:
Budapest, Hungary
Editors:
Hung-Yi Lee, Sunipa Dev, Jessy Li, Desmond Elliott
Venue:
Findings
SIG:
SIGDAT
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
45950–45963
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2026.findings-emnlp.2150/
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Wenyi Wang, Firas Laakom, Li Nanbo, Yanning Dai, Yuhui Wang, Yifan Xu, Dmitrii Khizbullin, Piotr Piękos, Yilan Zhang, Yimeng Chen, Alfonso Amayuelas, Mingchen Zhuge, and Jürgen Schmidhuber. 2026. OASIS: Online Anchor-calibrated Self-Improvement System. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2026, pages 45950–45963, Budapest, Hungary. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
OASIS: Online Anchor-calibrated Self-Improvement System (Wang et al., Findings 2026)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2026.findings-emnlp.2150.pdf