arXiv:2608.05810cs.AIcs.CL2026-08被引 1

大模型自进化会因技能污染导致性能下降,提出前置过滤机制有效防范。

When Self-Evolution Backfires: Pre-Commit Gating against Skill Contamination in LLM Agents

论文配图:When Self-Evolution Backfires: Pre-Commit Gating against Skill Contamination in LLM Agents
图 1 · 摘自论文原文
  • 用三重校验器在技能入库前实时筛选有害内容
  • 实验显示传统积累模式性能先升后降,回收效果极差
  • 新方法使小规模池子实现72%准确率,且可跨模型复用

自进化智能体通过提炼执行轨迹中的可复用技能来提升能力,但我们发现该过程并非单调上升:当技能池达到临界规模后,新增技能反而会降低性能。我们将其定义为能力污染相变,并追溯其结构性根源:一旦有缺陷技能进入决策上下文,就会成为后续技能提炼的参考,形成跨轮次污染链。污染具有结构性不可逆性:事后移除源头技能无法消除后代继承的错误推理,因此回滚仅能恢复少量性能损失。这表明技能准入必须前置而非事后补救,由此提出验证者作为看门人(VaG):基于结构有效性、行为无害性和语义一致性三类异构评审员对每个技能进行独立筛选,并结合边际增益子集选择,在顶层剔除组合污染,防止技能进入运行上下文。在Terminal-Bench 2上,无约束积累先升后降,持续增长导致多数收益丧失;而事后移除问题技能仅部分恢复性能——印证了不可逆性。相比之下,VaG每轮持续提升,以约5倍更小的池子达到72% pass@1,且冻结后的技能池可正向迁移至四个其他主干网络及第二个基准测试,无需重新演化。消融实验表明三类评审器互补且不可互换,各自拦截大量非重叠的有害技能类型。

原文摘要 · Abstract (English)

Self-evolving agents accumulate capability by distilling reusable skills from their execution trajectories, but we find this process is not monotonic: past a critical pool size, newly added skills degrade performance instead of improving it. We formalize this capability-contamination phase transition and trace it to a structural cause: once a defective skill enters the decision context, it becomes reference material for distilling later skills, forming cross-round contamination chains. We further show the contamination is structurally irreversible: removing a source skill after the fact cannot erase the flawed reasoning its descendants have already inherited, so post-hoc rollback recovers only a small fraction of the lost performance. This makes skill admission a pre-commit necessity rather than a post-hoc fix, and motivates Verifier-as-Gatekeeper (VaG): a progressive trust hierarchy whose three heterogeneous critics - structural validity, behavioral harmlessness, and semantic consistency - filter each skill individually, coupled with a marginal-gain subset selection that removes combinatorial contamination at the top tier before skills reach the runtime context. On Terminal-Bench 2, unconditional accumulation rises to a peak and then degrades, giving back most of its gains as the pool keeps growing, and post-hoc removal of the culprit skills recovers only a small part of the drop - the empirical signature of irreversibility. In contrast, VaG improves every round, reaching 72% pass@1 with a pool roughly 5x smaller, and its frozen skill pool transfers positively to four other backbones and a second benchmark without re-evolution. Ablations confirm the three critics are complementary and mutually non-substitutable, each intercepting a largely disjoint class of harmful skills.

大模型自进化技能污染可信推理

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