Jürgen Schmidhuber
Author directory2026
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
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2026
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
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2026
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.
How Much Can We Trust LLM Search Agents? Measuring Endorsement Vulnerability to Web Content Manipulation
Yimeng Chen | Zhe Ren | Firas Laakom | Yu Li | Dandan Guo | Jürgen Schmidhuber
Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Yimeng Chen | Zhe Ren | Firas Laakom | Yu Li | Dandan Guo | Jürgen Schmidhuber
Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Large language model (LLM)-based search agents synthesize open-web content into actionable recommendations on behalf of users, creating a risk that attacker-published pages are transformed into endorsed claims. We introduce SearchGEO, a controlled evaluation framework for measuring endorsement corruption in LLM-based web-search agents, combining a web-evidence manipulation pipeline, a five-mode attack taxonomy, and multiple output-level metrics. We evaluate 13 LLM backends on 308 cases each. Results show that vulnerability patterns vary across backends: overall attack success rate (ASR) ranges from 0.0% on Claude-Sonnet-4.6 to 31.4% on Gemini-3-Flash, the strongest attack mode differs by model family, and the same deployment scaffold could amplify or decrease ASR on different backends. An auxiliary agent-skill probe, where endorsement becomes an install command, exposes a sharp split among otherwise robust backends: Claude over-rejects while GPT over-trusts. These findings argue for treating recommendation reliability under adversarial search content as a first-class dimension of backend safety evaluation.
2025
Beyond Outlining: Heterogeneous Recursive Planning for Adaptive Long-form Writing with Language Models
Ruibin Xiong | Yimeng Chen | Dmitrii Khizbullin | Mingchen Zhuge | Jürgen Schmidhuber
Proceedings of the 2025 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Ruibin Xiong | Yimeng Chen | Dmitrii Khizbullin | Mingchen Zhuge | Jürgen Schmidhuber
Proceedings of the 2025 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Long-form writing agents require flexible integration and interaction across information retrieval, reasoning, and composition. Current approaches rely on predefined workflows and rigid thinking patterns to generate outlines before writing, resulting in constrained adaptability during writing. In this paper we propose WriteHERE, a general agent framework that achieves human-like adaptive writing through recursive task decomposition and dynamic integration of three fundamental task types: retrieval, reasoning, and composition. Our methodology features: 1) a planning mechanism that interleaves recursive task decomposition and execution, eliminating artificial restrictions on writing workflow; and 2) integration of task types that facilitates heterogeneous task decomposition. Evaluations on both fiction writing and technical report generation show that our method consistently outperforms state-of-the-art approaches across all automatic evaluation metrics, demonstrating the effectiveness and broad applicability of our proposed framework. We have publicly released our code and prompts to facilitate further research.
2023
Approximating Two-Layer Feedforward Networks for Efficient Transformers
Róbert Csordás | Kazuki Irie | Jürgen Schmidhuber
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2023
Róbert Csordás | Kazuki Irie | Jürgen Schmidhuber
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2023
How to reduce compute and memory requirements of neural networks (NNs) without sacrificing performance? Many recent works use sparse Mixtures of Experts (MoEs) to build resource-efficient large language models (LMs). Here we introduce several novel perspectives on MoEs, presenting a general framework that unifies various methods to approximate two-layer NNs (e.g., feedforward blocks of Transformers), including product-key memories (PKMs). Leveraging insights from this framework, we propose methods to improve both MoEs and PKMs. Unlike prior work that compares MoEs with dense baselines under the compute-equal condition, our evaluation condition is parameter-equal, which is crucial to properly evaluate LMs. We show that our MoEs are competitive with the dense Transformer-XL on both the WikiText-103 and enwiki8 datasets at two different scales, while being much more resource efficient. This demonstrates that MoEs are relevant not only to extremely large LMs but also to any-scale resource-efficient LMs. Our code is public.
Practical Computational Power of Linear Transformers and Their Recurrent and Self-Referential Extensions
Kazuki Irie | Róbert Csordás | Jürgen Schmidhuber
Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Kazuki Irie | Róbert Csordás | Jürgen Schmidhuber
Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Recent studies of the computational power of recurrent neural networks (RNNs) reveal a hierarchy of RNN architectures, given real-time and finite-precision assumptions. Here we study auto-regressive Transformers with linearised attention, a.k.a. linear Transformers (LTs) or Fast Weight Programmers (FWPs). LTs are special in the sense that they are equivalent to RNN-like sequence processors with a fixed-size state, while they can also be expressed as the now-popular self-attention networks. We show that many well-known results for the standard Transformer directly transfer to LTs/FWPs. Our formal language recognition experiments demonstrate how recently proposed FWP extensions such as recurrent FWPs and self-referential weight matrices successfully overcome certain limitations of the LT, e.g., allowing for generalisation on the parity problem. Our code is public.