% refs_v2_candidates.bib -- candidate entries for paper v2 (compiled 2026-10-24).
% Every entry below was checked against the source named in the comment line before it.
% Sources: arXiv API (export.arxiv.org), proceedings.iclr.cc page metadata, PMLR, ACL Anthology BibTeX,
% Crossref (publisher deposits), AAAI OJS page metadata, jmlr.org, the GitHub REST API, and Wayback Machine copies
% of the two blog posts (openai.com returns 403 to scripts). DBLP, OpenReview and Semantic Scholar were not used:
% DBLP and OpenReview answered with bot challenges and Semantic Scholar rate-limited every request.
% Keys do not collide with refs.bib. Section B gives venue versions of three refs.bib entries under new keys;
% use them instead of the old keys, not in addition.

% =====================================================================================================
% A. Entries requested for v2
% =====================================================================================================

% VERIFIED via PMLR page proceedings.mlr.press/v115/li20c.html (official BibTeX: UAI 2019, PMLR 115:367-377,
% volume dated 2020) + arXiv API 1902.07638 (journal_ref "Conference on Uncertainty in Artificial Intelligence (UAI), 2019").
% PMLR gives year 2020; the conference took place 22-25 July 2019. Set year={2019} if you prefer the conference year.
@inproceedings{li2019random,
  title={Random Search and Reproducibility for Neural Architecture Search},
  author={Li, Liam and Talwalkar, Ameet},
  booktitle={Proceedings of The 35th Uncertainty in Artificial Intelligence Conference},
  series={Proceedings of Machine Learning Research},
  volume={115},
  pages={367--377},
  editor={Adams, Ryan P. and Gogate, Vibhav},
  publisher={PMLR},
  year={2020},
  url={https://proceedings.mlr.press/v115/li20c.html}
}

% VERIFIED via iclr.cc/virtual_2020/poster_HygrdpVKvr.html (ICLR 2020 poster; authors Antoine Yang, Pedro M. Esperanca,
% Fabio M. Carlucci; links openreview.net/forum?id=HygrdpVKvr) + arXiv API 1912.12522 (comment: "Published as a
% conference paper at ICLR2020").
@inproceedings{yang2020nas,
  title={{NAS} evaluation is frustratingly hard},
  author={Yang, Antoine and Esperan{\c{c}}a, Pedro M. and Carlucci, Fabio M.},
  booktitle={International Conference on Learning Representations},
  year={2020},
  url={https://openreview.net/forum?id=HygrdpVKvr}
}

% VERIFIED via AAAI OJS page ojs.aaai.org/index.php/AAAI/article/view/11694 (citation metadata: vol 32, issue 1,
% 2018/04/29, DOI 10.1609/aaai.v32i1.11694) + Crossref + arXiv API 1709.06560. The page metadata has no page range,
% so none is given. Entry type article, because plainnat warns on volume plus number in inproceedings.
@article{henderson2018deep,
  title={Deep Reinforcement Learning That Matters},
  author={Henderson, Peter and Islam, Riashat and Bachman, Philip and Pineau, Joelle and Precup, Doina and Meger, David},
  journal={Proceedings of the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence},
  volume={32},
  number={1},
  year={2018},
  doi={10.1609/aaai.v32i1.11694}
}

% VERIFIED via proceedings.iclr.cc ICLR 2024 page edac78c3e300629acfe6cbe9ca88fb84 (title as printed there:
% "...Real-world Github Issues?"; pages 54107-54157) + arXiv API 2310.06770 (title "...Real-World GitHub Issues?";
% comment gives openreview.net/forum?id=VTF8yNQM66).
@inproceedings{jimenez2024swebench,
  title={{SWE}-bench: Can Language Models Resolve Real-world {Github} Issues?},
  author={Jimenez, Carlos E. and Yang, John and Wettig, Alexander and Yao, Shunyu and Pei, Kexin and Press, Ofir and Narasimhan, Karthik},
  booktitle={International Conference on Learning Representations},
  pages={54107--54157},
  year={2024},
  url={https://openreview.net/forum?id=VTF8yNQM66}
}

% VERIFIED via Wayback Machine copies of https://openai.com/index/introducing-swe-bench-verified/ (direct fetch returns 403):
% capture 20240821012250 shows "August 13, 2024" and 14 authors; capture 20261004223104 shows "Updated February 24, 2025"
% and 16 authors (adds Leyton Ho and Tejal Patwardhan after John Yang). The current list is used below.
% "Chan Jun Shern" on the post = surname Chan (listed as "Jun Shern Chan" on arXiv 2410.07095).
% For the citation to read "OpenAI (2024)", replace the author field with author={{OpenAI}}.
@misc{openai2024swebenchverified,
  title={Introducing {SWE-bench Verified}},
  author={Chowdhury, Neil and Aung, James and Chan, Jun Shern and Jaffe, Oliver and Sherburn, Dane and Starace, Giulio and Mays, Evan and Dias, Rachel and Aljubeh, Marwan and Glaese, Mia and Jimenez, Carlos E. and Yang, John and Ho, Leyton and Patwardhan, Tejal and Liu, Kevin and Madry, Aleksander},
  howpublished={OpenAI blog post, \url{https://openai.com/index/introducing-swe-bench-verified/}},
  year={2024},
  month=aug,
  note={Published 13 August 2024, updated 24 February 2025}
}

% VERIFIED via Crossref DOI 10.1145/3715754 (publisher deposit: Proc. ACM Softw. Eng. 2(FSE), pp. 801-824, 2025; four
% authors) + arXiv API 2407.01489. The published title drops "Agentless:"; arXiv title is
% "Agentless: Demystifying LLM-based Software Engineering Agents". For the preprint use
% journal={arXiv preprint arXiv:2407.01489}, year={2024} with the arXiv title.
@article{xia2025agentless,
  title={Demystifying {LLM}-Based Software Engineering Agents},
  author={Xia, Chunqiu Steven and Deng, Yinlin and Dunn, Soren and Zhang, Lingming},
  journal={Proceedings of the ACM on Software Engineering},
  volume={2},
  number={FSE},
  pages={801--824},
  year={2025},
  doi={10.1145/3715754}
}

% VERIFIED via arXiv API 2407.21787 (v3, 7 authors). No venue version found in the ICLR 2025/2026 proceedings,
% PMLR v267 (ICML 2025) or Crossref, so the preprint is cited.
@article{brown2024monkeys,
  title={Large Language Monkeys: Scaling Inference Compute with Repeated Sampling},
  author={Brown, Bradley and Juravsky, Jordan and Ehrlich, Ryan and Clark, Ronald and Le, Quoc V. and R{\'e}, Christopher and Mirhoseini, Azalia},
  journal={arXiv preprint arXiv:2407.21787},
  year={2024}
}

% VERIFIED via proceedings.iclr.cc ICLR 2025 page 5492ecbce4439401798dcd2c90be94cd (14 authors; pages 34040-34077)
% + arXiv API 2410.10762.
@inproceedings{zhang2025aflow,
  title={{AFlow}: Automating Agentic Workflow Generation},
  author={Zhang, Jiayi and Xiang, Jinyu and Yu, Zhaoyang and Teng, Fengwei and Chen, Xionghui and Chen, Jiaqi and Zhuge, Mingchen and Cheng, Xin and Hong, Sirui and Wang, Jinlin and Zheng, Bingnan and Liu, Bang and Luo, Yuyu and Wu, Chenglin},
  booktitle={International Conference on Learning Representations},
  pages={34040--34077},
  year={2025}
}

% VERIFIED via ACL Anthology BibTeX aclanthology.org/2025.acl-long.1354.bib + Crossref DOI 10.18653/v1/2025.acl-long.1354
% + arXiv API 2410.04444 (comment "ACL 2025 main"). The PUBLISHED title reads "...for Recursively Self-Improvement";
% the arXiv title reads "...for Recursive Self-Improvement". A venue citation should keep the published title.
@inproceedings{yin2025godel,
  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 {A}ssociation for {C}omputational {L}inguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)},
  address={Vienna, Austria},
  publisher={Association for Computational Linguistics},
  pages={27890--27913},
  year={2025},
  doi={10.18653/v1/2025.acl-long.1354},
  url={https://aclanthology.org/2025.acl-long.1354/}
}

% VERIFIED via arXiv API 2504.15228 (v2, 3 authors; comment "Submitted as a preprint to NeurIPS 2025"). No venue
% version found (Crossref, ICLR 2026 proceedings), so the preprint is cited.
@article{robeyns2025sica,
  title={A Self-Improving Coding Agent},
  author={Robeyns, Maxime and Szummer, Martin and Aitchison, Laurence},
  journal={arXiv preprint arXiv:2504.15228},
  year={2025}
}

% VERIFIED via iclr.cc/virtual/2023/poster/11718 (ICLR 2023 poster; 8 authors; links openreview.net/forum?id=1PL1NIMMrw)
% + arXiv API 2203.11171 (comment "Published at ICLR 2023").
@inproceedings{wang2023selfconsistency,
  title={Self-Consistency Improves Chain of Thought Reasoning in Language Models},
  author={Wang, Xuezhi and Wei, Jason and Schuurmans, Dale and Le, Quoc V. and Chi, Ed H. and Narang, Sharan and Chowdhery, Aakanksha and Zhou, Denny},
  booktitle={International Conference on Learning Representations},
  year={2023},
  url={https://openreview.net/forum?id=1PL1NIMMrw}
}

% VERIFIED via https://www.anthropic.com/research/swe-bench-sonnet (canonical URL; heading "Raising the bar on
% SWE-bench Verified with Claude 3.5 Sonnet"; page now shows "Published Jan 6, 2025", og:title "Claude SWE-Bench
% performance") + Wayback capture 20241030190919 of the same URL (og:title = heading, dated "Oct 30, 2024").
% The acknowledgements say "Erik Schluntz optimized the SWE-bench agent and wrote this blog post".
% For "Anthropic (2024)" replace the author field with author={{Anthropic}}.
@misc{anthropic2024swebench,
  title={Raising the bar on {SWE-bench Verified} with {Claude 3.5 Sonnet}},
  author={Schluntz, Erik},
  howpublished={Anthropic blog post, \url{https://www.anthropic.com/research/swe-bench-sonnet}},
  year={2024},
  month=oct,
  note={Published 30 October 2024; the current page is dated 6 January 2025}
}

% =====================================================================================================
% B. Venue versions of refs.bib entries (new keys; refs.bib currently cites the arXiv preprints)
% =====================================================================================================

% VERIFIED via proceedings.iclr.cc ICLR 2026 page aa5f5e6eb6f613ec412f1d948dfa21a5 (5 authors; pages 104223-104294)
% + arXiv API 2505.22954. Replaces refs.bib key zhang2025dgm; braces keep "Darwin G\"odel Machine" capitalised
% (the current main.bbl prints "Darwin g\"odel machine").
@inproceedings{zhang2026dgm,
  title={{Darwin G{\"o}del Machine}: Open-Ended Evolution of Self-Improving Agents},
  author={Zhang, Jenny and Hu, Shengran and Lu, Cong and Lange, Robert and Clune, Jeff},
  booktitle={International Conference on Learning Representations},
  pages={104223--104294},
  year={2026}
}

% VERIFIED via proceedings.iclr.cc ICLR 2026 page 821d20219c2f14850af1b5220f0ed13f (8 authors, third listed as
% "Nanbo, Li", as in refs.bib; pages 80356-80386) + arXiv API 2510.21614 (lists "Li Nanbo"). Replaces refs.bib key
% wang2025hgm; braces fix the printed "Huxley-g\"odel machine".
@inproceedings{wang2026hgm,
  title={{Huxley-G{\"o}del Machine}: Human-Level Coding Agent Development by an Approximation of the Optimal Self-Improving Machine},
  author={Wang, Wenyi and Pi{\k{e}}kos, Piotr and Nanbo, Li and Laakom, Firas and Chen, Yimeng and Ostaszewski, Mateusz and Zhuge, Mingchen and Schmidhuber, J{\"u}rgen},
  booktitle={International Conference on Learning Representations},
  pages={80356--80386},
  year={2026}
}

% VERIFIED via proceedings.iclr.cc ICLR 2025 page 94074dd5a072d28ff75a76dabed43767 (pages 58791-58831; the page's
% author metadata leaves the second slot blank) + arXiv API 2403.07974 (second author King Han). Replaces refs.bib key
% jain2024livecodebench.
@inproceedings{jain2025livecodebench,
  title={{LiveCodeBench}: Holistic and Contamination Free Evaluation of Large Language Models for Code},
  author={Jain, Naman and Han, King and Gu, Alex and Li, Wen-Ding and Yan, Fanjia and Zhang, Tianjun and Wang, Sida and Solar-Lezama, Armando and Sen, Koushik and Stoica, Ion},
  booktitle={International Conference on Learning Representations},
  pages={58791--58831},
  year={2025}
}

% =====================================================================================================
% C. Related-work candidates from the 2025-2026 scan (see related_work_notes.md for what each shows).
%    Generated from one arXiv API id_list response (titles and complete author lists as on arXiv), then
%    checked by hand: brace protection for acronyms and names, and "zujie wen" (lower case on arXiv)
%    capitalised as "Zujie Wen".
% =====================================================================================================

% VERIFIED via arXiv API (export.arxiv.org id_list=2610.22466; latest 2610.22466v1; first posted 2026-10-15; 8 authors)
@article{ding2026hda,
  title={{Harness-Delta Attribution}: Dissecting Gains From Harness Evolution},
  author={Ding, Wenxuan and Lu, Qin and Yu, Changlong and Li, Sha and Jin, Shuowei and Liu, Xin and Shi, Zhenyu and Durrett, Greg},
  journal={arXiv preprint arXiv:2610.22466},
  year={2026}
}

% VERIFIED via arXiv API (export.arxiv.org id_list=2610.05533; latest 2610.05533v1; first posted 2026-10-04; 2 authors)
@article{xu2026harnessrepair,
  title={What Does a Harness Repair? A Preregistered Study of Visibility, Baseline Adequacy and Evaluation Defects},
  author={Xu, Bowen and Chen, Boyu},
  journal={arXiv preprint arXiv:2610.05533},
  year={2026}
}

% VERIFIED via arXiv API (export.arxiv.org id_list=2610.14662; latest 2610.14662v1; first posted 2026-10-10; 1 author)
@article{he2026failurefeedback,
  title={Does Failure Feedback Direct Agent Self-Modification?},
  author={He, Rong},
  journal={arXiv preprint arXiv:2610.14662},
  year={2026}
}

% VERIFIED via arXiv API (export.arxiv.org id_list=2606.13003; latest 2606.13003v2; first posted 2026-06-11; 10 authors)
@article{jwalapuram2026illusion,
  title={The Illusion of Multi-Agent Advantage},
  author={Jwalapuram, Prathyusha and Lin, Hehai and Li, Chuyuan and Jiao, Fangkai and Wang, Sudong and Ming, Yifei and Ke, Zixuan and Qin, Chengwei and Carenini, Giuseppe and Joty, Shafiq},
  journal={arXiv preprint arXiv:2606.13003},
  year={2026}
}

% VERIFIED via arXiv API (export.arxiv.org id_list=2610.23977; latest 2610.23977v1; first posted 2026-10-13; 4 authors)
@article{oved2026tokens,
  title={{LLM} Evolutionary Search Strategies Should be Compared by Tokens},
  author={Oved, Tal and Pony, Roi and Naparstek, Oshri and Barzelay, Udi},
  journal={arXiv preprint arXiv:2610.23977},
  year={2026}
}

% VERIFIED via arXiv API (export.arxiv.org id_list=2608.19626; latest 2608.19626v1; first posted 2026-08-20; 6 authors)
@article{liang2026testgen,
  title={Auditing and Decomposing Feedback-Driven Evolution in {LLM} Test Generation under the Oracle Problem},
  author={Liang, Yunhao and Gan, Chengguang and Ying, Ruixuan and Wei, Hanjun and Cui, Zhe and Ni, Shiwen},
  journal={arXiv preprint arXiv:2608.19626},
  year={2026}
}

% VERIFIED via arXiv API (export.arxiv.org id_list=2610.14460; latest 2610.14460v1; first posted 2026-10-10; 6 authors)
@article{ding2026reexecuting,
  title={Re-executing Coding-Agent Evaluations: Unchanged Decisions and Unresolved Policy Risk},
  author={Ding, Tianyu and Tong, Yaocheng and Yang, Muzhi and Jiang, Fei and Yang, Lei and Yu, Boya},
  journal={arXiv preprint arXiv:2610.14460},
  year={2026}
}

% VERIFIED via arXiv API (export.arxiv.org id_list=2610.11655; latest 2610.11655v1; first posted 2026-10-08; 5 authors)
@article{tian2026ceiling,
  title={Harness Evolution Hits a Ceiling: When Weight Training Should Begin},
  author={Tian, Yuan and Hu, Bing and Wang, Hao and Lu, Binghang and Wu, Fang},
  journal={arXiv preprint arXiv:2610.11655},
  year={2026}
}

% VERIFIED via arXiv API (export.arxiv.org id_list=2607.26117; latest 2607.26117v1; first posted 2026-07-28; 1 author)
@article{verma2026tryagain,
  title={Try Again, Don't Look Back: Blind Resampling Outperforms Self-Repair in Small Code Models},
  author={Verma, Yuvraj},
  journal={arXiv preprint arXiv:2607.26117},
  year={2026}
}

% VERIFIED via arXiv API (export.arxiv.org id_list=2609.33180; latest 2609.33180v1; first posted 2026-09-27; 4 authors)
@article{sun2026reuse,
  title={Which Self-Improvements Should We Trust? Reliable Self-Improvement When Agents Reuse Their Benchmarks},
  author={Sun, Xiaojing and Zeng, Yuhan and She, Zihua and Wang, Xiao},
  journal={arXiv preprint arXiv:2609.33180},
  year={2026}
}

% VERIFIED via arXiv API (export.arxiv.org id_list=2610.27889; latest 2610.27889v1; first posted 2026-10-20; 9 authors)
@article{kim2026elicitation,
  title={Elicitation or Expansion? Demystifying Gains from Agent Harness Optimization},
  author={Kim, Younghyun and Seo, Wooseok and Kim, Minseo and Oh, Seunghyuk and Lee, Minjae and Kim, Donghoon and Koo, Hyung Il and Kim, Jaehyung and Kang, Wonjun},
  journal={arXiv preprint arXiv:2610.27889},
  year={2026}
}

% VERIFIED via arXiv API (export.arxiv.org id_list=2609.18366; latest 2609.18366v1; first posted 2026-09-16; 6 authors)
@article{zhu2026badgenius,
  title={{Bad Genius}: Counterfactual-Guided Harness Evolution Beyond Task-Specific Shortcuts},
  author={Zhu, Guojun and Huang, Xunheng and Yin, Peng and Xie, Jiahui and Zhang, Sanguo and Zhou, Doudou},
  journal={arXiv preprint arXiv:2609.18366},
  year={2026}
}

% VERIFIED via arXiv API (export.arxiv.org id_list=2606.04455; latest 2606.04455v1; first posted 2026-06-03; 11 authors;
% arXiv lists the fourth author in lower case as "zujie wen")
@article{lu2026metaagent,
  title={The {Meta-Agent Challenge}: Are Current Agents Capable of Autonomous Agent Development?},
  author={Lu, Xinyu and Wang, Tianshu and Wang, Pengbo and Wen, Zujie and Zhang, Zhiqiang and Zhou, Jun and Cao, Boxi and Lu, Yaojie and Lin, Hongyu and Han, Xianpei and Sun, Le},
  journal={arXiv preprint arXiv:2606.04455},
  year={2026}
}

% VERIFIED via arXiv API (export.arxiv.org id_list=2607.13085; latest 2607.13085v1; first posted 2026-07-13; 3 authors)
@article{dhakal2026baselines,
  title={Baselines Before Architecture: Evaluating Coding Agents for Autonomous Penetration Testing},
  author={Dhakal, Ananda and Neupane, Krish and Chaudhary, Aarjan},
  journal={arXiv preprint arXiv:2607.13085},
  year={2026}
}

% VERIFIED via arXiv API (export.arxiv.org id_list=2609.06780; latest 2609.06780v2; first posted 2026-09-06; 4 authors)
@article{ludwig2026shortcutting,
  title={Shortcutting the Fix: Identifying and Categorizing Agentic Exploits in Software Engineering Benchmarks},
  author={Ludwig, Nikolai and Ahmad, Wasi Uddin and Majumdar, Somshubra and Ginsburg, Boris},
  journal={arXiv preprint arXiv:2609.06780},
  year={2026}
}

% VERIFIED via arXiv API (export.arxiv.org id_list=2606.16062; latest 2606.16062v1; first posted 2026-06-14; 1 author)
@article{rajan2026hackability,
  title={Auditing Reward Hackability in Code {RL} Training Environments},
  author={Rajan, Shreshth},
  journal={arXiv preprint arXiv:2606.16062},
  year={2026}
}

% VERIFIED via arXiv API (export.arxiv.org id_list=2609.17817; latest 2609.17817v1; first posted 2026-09-15; 2 authors)
@article{roesner2026trusting,
  title={{Reflections on Trusting Trust}, Revisited: Contaminating Self-Modifying {AI} Coding Agents with Poisoned Benchmarks},
  author={Roesner, Franziska and Kohno, Tadayoshi},
  journal={arXiv preprint arXiv:2609.17817},
  year={2026}
}

% VERIFIED via arXiv API (export.arxiv.org id_list=2512.01420; latest 2512.01420v1; first posted 2025-12-01; 7 authors)
@article{wang2025promptbridge,
  title={{PromptBridge}: Cross-Model Prompt Transfer for Large Language Models},
  author={Wang, Yaxuan and Liu, Quan and Wang, Zhenting and Li, Zichao and Wei, Wei and Liu, Yang and Bao, Yujia},
  journal={arXiv preprint arXiv:2512.01420},
  year={2025}
}

% VERIFIED via arXiv API (export.arxiv.org id_list=2604.25850; latest 2604.25850v1; first posted 2026-04-28; 11 authors)
@article{lin2026ahe,
  title={{Agentic Harness Engineering}: Observability-Driven Automatic Evolution of Coding-Agent Harnesses},
  author={Lin, Jiahang and Liu, Shichun and Pan, Chengjun and Lin, Lizhi and Dou, Shihan and Xi, Zhiheng and Huang, Xuanjing and Yan, Hang and Han, Zhenhua and Gui, Tao and Jiang, Yu-Gang},
  journal={arXiv preprint arXiv:2604.25850},
  year={2026}
}

% VERIFIED via arXiv API (export.arxiv.org id_list=2609.26457; latest 2609.26457v1; first posted 2026-09-22; 5 authors)
@article{srikanth2026aide2,
  title={Recursive self-improvement of {AI} research agents},
  author={Srikanth, Dhruv and Zhao, Bingchen and Xu, Dixing and Wu, Yuxiang and Jiang, Zhengyao},
  journal={arXiv preprint arXiv:2609.26457},
  year={2026}
}

% VERIFIED via arXiv API (export.arxiv.org id_list=2511.21654; latest 2511.21654v1; first posted 2025-11-26; 3 authors)
@article{gabor2025evilgenie,
  title={{EvilGenie}: A Reward Hacking Benchmark},
  author={Gabor, Jonathan and Lynch, Jayson and Rosenfeld, Jonathan},
  journal={arXiv preprint arXiv:2511.21654},
  year={2025}
}

% VERIFIED via arXiv API (export.arxiv.org id_list=2510.11977; 31 authors; first posted 2025-10-13); venue VERIFIED via
% proceedings.iclr.cc ICLR 2026 page a0928f924a344aaebbb7f6cd8d56e34c (pages 98778-98849)
@inproceedings{kapoor2026hal,
  title={{Holistic Agent Leaderboard}: The Missing Infrastructure for {AI} Agent Evaluation},
  author={Kapoor, Sayash and Stroebl, Benedikt and Kirgis, Peter and Nadgir, Nitya and Siegel, Zachary S and Wei, Boyi and Xue, Tianci and Chen, Ziru and Chen, Felix and Utpala, Saiteja and Ndzomga, Franck and Oruganty, Dheeraj and Luskin, Sophie and Liu, Kangheng and Yu, Botao and Arora, Amit and Hahm, Dongyoon and Trivedi, Harsh and Sun, Huan and Lee, Juyong and Jin, Tengjun and Mai, Yifan and Zhou, Yifei and Zhu, Yuxuan and Bommasani, Rishi and Kang, Daniel and Song, Dawn and Henderson, Peter and Su, Yu and Liang, Percy and Narayanan, Arvind},
  booktitle={International Conference on Learning Representations},
  pages={98778--98849},
  year={2026}
}

% VERIFIED via arXiv API (export.arxiv.org id_list=2510.20270; 3 authors; first posted 2025-10-23); venue VERIFIED via
% proceedings.iclr.cc ICLR 2026 page ca688eb14e29701a11bdba6633186328 (pages 124959-124986)
@inproceedings{zhong2026impossiblebench,
  title={{ImpossibleBench}: Measuring {LLMs}' Propensity of Exploiting Test Cases},
  author={Zhong, Ziqian and Raghunathan, Aditi and Carlini, Nicholas},
  booktitle={International Conference on Learning Representations},
  pages={124959--124986},
  year={2026}
}

% VERIFIED via arXiv API (export.arxiv.org id_list=2407.01502; latest 2407.01502v1; first posted 2024-07-01; 5 authors)
@article{kapoor2024agents,
  title={{AI} Agents That Matter},
  author={Kapoor, Sayash and Stroebl, Benedikt and Siegel, Zachary S. and Nadgir, Nitya and Narayanan, Arvind},
  journal={arXiv preprint arXiv:2407.01502},
  year={2024}
}

% VERIFIED via arXiv API (export.arxiv.org id_list=2507.02825; latest 2507.02825v5; first posted 2025-07-03; 25 authors)
@article{zhu2025abc,
  title={Establishing Best Practices for Building Rigorous Agentic Benchmarks},
  author={Zhu, Yuxuan and Jin, Tengjun and Pruksachatkun, Yada and Zhang, Andy and Liu, Shu and Cui, Sasha and Kapoor, Sayash and Longpre, Shayne and Meng, Kevin and Weiss, Rebecca and Barez, Fazl and Gupta, Rahul and Dhamala, Jwala and Merizian, Jacob and Giulianelli, Mario and Coppock, Harry and Ududec, Cozmin and Sekhon, Jasjeet and Steinhardt, Jacob and Kellermann, Antony and Schwettmann, Sarah and Zaharia, Matei and Stoica, Ion and Liang, Percy and Kang, Daniel},
  journal={arXiv preprint arXiv:2507.02825},
  year={2025}
}

% VERIFIED via arXiv API (export.arxiv.org id_list=2410.06992; latest 2410.06992v2; first posted 2024-10-09; 6 authors)
@article{aleithan2024swebenchplus,
  title={{SWE-Bench}+: Enhanced Coding Benchmark for {LLMs}},
  author={Aleithan, Reem and Xue, Haoran and Mohajer, Mohammad Mahdi and Nnorom, Elijah and Uddin, Gias and Wang, Song},
  journal={arXiv preprint arXiv:2410.06992},
  year={2024}
}

% VERIFIED via arXiv API (export.arxiv.org id_list=2503.15223; latest 2503.15223v2; first posted 2025-03-19; 3 authors)
@article{wang2025solved,
  title={Are ``Solved Issues'' in {SWE-bench} Really Solved Correctly? An Empirical Study},
  author={Wang, You and Pradel, Michael and Liu, Zhongxin},
  journal={arXiv preprint arXiv:2503.15223},
  year={2025}
}

% VERIFIED via arXiv API (export.arxiv.org id_list=2504.20879; latest 2504.20879v2; first posted 2025-04-29; 13 authors)
@article{singh2025leaderboard,
  title={The Leaderboard Illusion},
  author={Singh, Shivalika and Nan, Yiyang and Wang, Alex and D'Souza, Daniel and Kapoor, Sayash and {\"U}st{\"u}n, Ahmet and Koyejo, Sanmi and Deng, Yuntian and Longpre, Shayne and Smith, Noah A. and Ermis, Beyza and Fadaee, Marzieh and Hooker, Sara},
  journal={arXiv preprint arXiv:2504.20879},
  year={2025}
}

% VERIFIED via arXiv API (export.arxiv.org id_list=2307.09009; latest 2307.09009v3; first posted 2023-07-18; 3 authors)
@article{chen2023chatgpt,
  title={How is {ChatGPT}'s behavior changing over time?},
  author={Chen, Lingjiao and Zaharia, Matei and Zou, James},
  journal={arXiv preprint arXiv:2307.09009},
  year={2023}
}

% VERIFIED via arXiv API (export.arxiv.org id_list=2310.02304; latest 2310.02304v3; first posted 2023-10-03; 4 authors);
% arXiv comment says COLM 2024 (venue not independently verified; OpenReview was unreachable)
@article{zelikman2023stop,
  title={{Self-Taught Optimizer} ({STOP}): Recursively Self-Improving Code Generation},
  author={Zelikman, Eric and Lorch, Eliana and Mackey, Lester and Kalai, Adam Tauman},
  journal={arXiv preprint arXiv:2310.02304},
  year={2023}
}

% VERIFIED via GitHub REST API api.github.com/repos/SWE-bench/SWE-bench/issues/465 (title as below; opened
% 2025-09-03 by user jacobkahn; closed 2026-03-24). Agents used `git log --all` to read future commits that fix the issue.
@misc{swebench2025issue465,
  title={Repo State Loopholes During Agentic Evaluation},
  author={{SWE-bench GitHub issue \#465}},
  howpublished={\url{https://github.com/SWE-bench/SWE-bench/issues/465}},
  year={2025},
  note={Opened 3 September 2025}
}

% =====================================================================================================
% D. Classic anchors for selection noise and adaptive overfitting (optional)
% =====================================================================================================

% VERIFIED via proceedings.mlr.press/v97/recht19a.html (ICML 2019; pages 5389-5400) + arXiv API 1902.10811 (4 authors)
@inproceedings{recht2019imagenet,
  title={Do {ImageNet} Classifiers Generalize to {ImageNet}?},
  author={Recht, Benjamin and Roelofs, Rebecca and Schmidt, Ludwig and Shankar, Vaishaal},
  booktitle={Proceedings of the 36th International Conference on Machine Learning},
  series={Proceedings of Machine Learning Research},
  volume={97},
  pages={5389--5400},
  publisher={PMLR},
  year={2019}
}

% VERIFIED via jmlr.org/papers/v11/cawley10a.html (citation metadata: JMLR 11, pages 2079-2107, 2010)
@article{cawley2010overfitting,
  title={On Over-fitting in Model Selection and Subsequent Selection Bias in Performance Evaluation},
  author={Cawley, Gavin C. and Talbot, Nicola L. C.},
  journal={Journal of Machine Learning Research},
  volume={11},
  pages={2079--2107},
  year={2010}
}

% VERIFIED via Crossref DOI 10.1126/science.aaa9375 (Science 349(6248):636-638, 2015-08-07; 6 authors)
@article{dwork2015reusable,
  title={The reusable holdout: Preserving validity in adaptive data analysis},
  author={Dwork, Cynthia and Feldman, Vitaly and Hardt, Moritz and Pitassi, Toniann and Reingold, Omer and Roth, Aaron},
  journal={Science},
  volume={349},
  number={6248},
  pages={636--638},
  year={2015},
  doi={10.1126/science.aaa9375}
}

@inproceedings{hu2025adas, title={Automated Design of Agentic Systems}, author={Hu, Shengran and Lu, Cong and Clune, Jeff}, booktitle={International Conference on Learning Representations}, year={2025}}
@article{zhang2026hyperagents, title={Hyperagents}, author={Zhang, Jenny and Zhao, Bingchen and Yang, Wannan and Foerster, Jakob and Clune, Jeff and Jiang, Minqi and Devlin, Sam and Shavrina, Tatiana}, journal={arXiv preprint arXiv:2603.19461}, year={2026}}
@article{hu2026winners, title={The Winner's Curse in {LLM} Self-Improvement Loops: Selection Noise, Lock-in, and Acceptance Rules}, author={Hu, Litao and Tang, Yutong}, journal={arXiv preprint arXiv:2610.09239}, year={2026}}
@article{wang2026rethinking, title={Rethinking the Evaluation of Harness Evolution for Agents}, author={Wang, Yike and Zhu, Huaisheng and Hu, Zhengyu and Yuan, Yige and Chen, Zhengyu and Senthil, Shakti and Hajishirzi, Hannaneh and Tsvetkov, Yulia and Smith, Noah A. and Dasigi, Pradeep and Xiao, Teng}, journal={arXiv preprint arXiv:2607.12227}, year={2026}}
@article{xia2026rrsi, title={{RRSI}: Regularized Recursive Self-Improvement of Agent Harnesses}, author={Xia, Peng and Han, Rujun and Wang, Zifeng and Chen, Yanfei and others}, journal={arXiv preprint arXiv:2609.24972}, year={2026}}
@article{chen2026auditing, title={Auditing the Product, Not the Recursion: The Evaluation Evidence Behind Recursive Self-Improvement Claims}, author={Chen, Zihan and Zhu, Di and Zheng, Lei Nico}, journal={arXiv preprint arXiv:2610.27610}, year={2026}}

% VERIFIED via arXiv API (id_list=2608.09629), 2026-10-25
@article{xue2026rethinking, title={Rethinking Self-Evolving Agents: Do We Still Need Prescribed Optimization Pipelines?}, author={Xue, Hui and Yang, Fan}, journal={arXiv preprint arXiv:2608.09629}, year={2026}}