SIA (Self-Improving AI)

Official implementation of SIA: Self Improving AI with Harness & Weight Updates (Hebbar et al., 2026) — a self-improving loop where a language-model agent updates both the harness and the weights of a task-specific agent. The paper reports a 56.6% gain on LawBench, 91.9% runtime reduction on GPU kernels, and 502% improvement on single-cell RNA denoising over baseline.

SIA is a Self Improving AI framework to autonomously improve the performance of any AI system (Model / Agent) on a benchmark task.

Just want to try it? Skip to Run SIA locally.

Introduction Videos

• SIA setup
• SIA Runs Visualizer

Architecture

Control flow between Meta, Target, and Feedback agents over successive generations.

SIA operates by coordinating three main types of AI agents that work together to continuously improve task performance:

Glossary

1. Meta-Agent: Reads the task description and generates an initial Target Agent tailored to the task.
2. Target / Task Specific Agent: Attempts to complete the task and records its actions and results.
3. Feedback/Improvement Agent: Reviews the Target Agent's performance logs, identifies improvements, and updates the Target Agent accordingly.

This iterative process allows the system to autonomously refine and enhance its ability to solve scientific tasks.

Benchmark Results

OpenAI MLE-Bench Hard: a gauntlet of real Kaggle ML competitions where agents must write, run, and iterate full ML pipelines. SIA ranks #1 across all generations tested.

LawBench: predict the criminal charge from Chinese court case descriptions across 191 charge categories. SIA-W+H reaches 70.1% Top-1 accuracy, beating the prior SOTA of 45%.

AlphaFold-3 TriMul Triton Kernel: implement and optimize the Triangle Multiplicative Update as a Triton kernel, preserving correctness while hitting H100 latency targets. SIA-W+H achieves 14x speedup over baseline.

scRNA-seq Denoising: impute missing gene expression values in single-cell RNA sequencing data. SIA-W+H scores 0.289 MSE_norm, surpassing the prior SOTA of 0.220.

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Run SIA locally with built-in tasks

SIA ships with four built-in tasks: gpqa, lawbench, longcot-chess, spaceship-titanic.

Install

Pick the agent impl that matches the LLMs you want to run.

Claude agent impl (Claude Agent SDK, Claude models only):

python3 -m venv .venv && source .venv/bin/activate
pip install 'sia-agent[claude]'
export ANTHROPIC_API_KEY="..."

OpenHands agent impl (multi-provider — Gemini, OpenAI, Anthropic, etc.):

python3 -m venv .venv && source .venv/bin/activate
pip install 'sia-agent[openhands]'

# Export the key(s) for the provider(s) you'll use:
export ANTHROPIC_API_KEY="..."   # for anthropic/* models
export GEMINI_API_KEY="..."      # for gemini/* models (or GOOGLE_API_KEY)
export OPENAI_API_KEY="..."      # for openai/* models

Full provider/model reference: docs/configuration.md.

Run

The CLI has two sub-commands: sia run (the self-improvement loop) and sia web (the runs visualizer, see Visualize runs).

sia run --task gpqa --max_gen 5 --run_id 1

Swap --task for any of the four bundled tasks. (sia --task ... without the run sub-command still works and is treated as sia run ....)

Artifacts land in runs/run_{run_id}/gen_{n}/:

• target_agent.py — the agent for that generation
• agent_execution.json — execution logs
• improvement.md — diff rationale (gen 2+)

While a run is in progress a live dashboard auto-starts at http://127.0.0.1:8000 (requires the web extra; disable with --no-web).

Common flags (sia run)

Flag	Default	Description
--task	—	Bundled task name (mutually exclusive with --task_dir)
--task_dir	—	Path to an external task directory
--max_gen	3	Number of self-improvement generations
--run_id	1	Unique run identifier
--meta-agent-profile	default-meta	Profile for the meta/feedback agent (name or path to a .json)
--target-agent-profile	default-target	Profile for the target agent (name or path to a .json)
--no-web	off	Don't auto-start the live dashboard during the run
--web-port	8000	Port for the live dashboard (--web-host to change the bind host)

The model, agent impl, and provider for each agent come from a profile (see below). For example, to evaluate Kimi-K2.6 on Nebius as the target model:

export NEBIUS_API_KEY="..."        # + ANTHROPIC_API_KEY for the default meta agent
sia run --task gpqa --target-agent-profile kimi-nebius-target --max_gen 5 --run_id 2

Full agent-impl, model, and API-key reference: docs/configuration.md. Hit a snag? docs/troubleshooting.md.

Visualize runs

A built-in web dashboard renders everything under runs/: the per-generation target-agent code (syntax-highlighted), meta/feedback prompts, improvement plans, evaluation scores (with an accuracy-across-generations chart and per-domain breakdown), execution trajectories, and logs.

sia web                          # serve ./runs at http://127.0.0.1:8000
sia web --runs-dir ./runs --port 8080

It also starts automatically alongside sia run (disable with --no-web), so you can watch generations land live.

Flag	Default	Description
--runs-dir	./runs	Directory of runs to visualize
--host	127.0.0.1	Bind host
--port	8000	Bind port
--no-browser	off	Don't open a browser window automatically

Author your own profile

A provider is an endpoint + credentials; a profile configures one agent role. A meta-agent profile bundles (agent_impl, model, provider); a target-agent profile bundles (model, provider, agent_reference). Both are JSON files — bundled defaults live in sia/defaults/{providers,profiles}/, and you can add your own under ./providers/ and ./profiles/ (or set $SIA_PROVIDERS_DIR / $SIA_PROFILES_DIR). No code change required.

mkdir -p providers profiles

// providers/my-endpoint.json   — an OpenAI-compatible provider
{
  "provider_id": "my-endpoint",
  "name": "My Endpoint",
  "client_kind": "openai",                 // anthropic | openai | google
  "base_url": "https://api.example.com/v1",
  "api_key_env": "MY_ENDPOINT_API_KEY"
}

// profiles/my-target.json      — the target agent's model + provider + reference
{
  "profile_id": "my-target",
  "name": "My model on My Endpoint",
  "model": "vendor/my-model",
  "provider_id": "my-endpoint",             // references the provider above
  "agent_reference": "default"              // "default" = the task package's reference;
                                            // or { "source": "./my_agent_dir/", "entrypoint": "main.py" }
}

export MY_ENDPOINT_API_KEY="..."
sia run --task gpqa --target-agent-profile my-target      # by name (resolves ./profiles/my-target.json)
sia run --task gpqa --target-agent-profile ./profiles/my-target.json   # or by explicit path

The agent_reference is the seed the meta-agent starts from and the feedback-agent improves: "default" uses the task package's bundled reference, or supply your own with { "source": "./my_agent.py" } (a single file) or { "source": "./dir/", "entrypoint": "main.py" } (a multi-file directory the agent reads with its tools). A requirements.txt inside a directory reference is installed per generation.

To run the meta/feedback agent elsewhere, give a meta profile a different agent_impl (openhands or pydantic-ai) and pass it with --meta-agent-profile. The claude agent impl is Anthropic-only. See docs/configuration.md for the full schema and more examples.

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Bring your own task

Prepare a task directory with the layout below and point --task_dir at it:

my-task/
├── data/
│   ├── public/
│   │   ├── task.md          # Task description — SIA reads this
│   │   └── ...              # Inputs the agent is allowed to see
│   └── private/             # Held-out eval data; never exposed to the agent
└── reference/
    ├── reference_target_agent.py     # Template; copy from sia/tasks/_shared/
    └── SAMPLE_TASK_DESCRIPTIONS.md   # Optional: example tasks for the meta-agent

sia run --task_dir ./my-task --max_gen 5 --run_id 1

Or bring an MLE-Bench competition. SIA can bootstrap a task directory directly from any MLE-Bench competition — it pulls the dataset via the Kaggle API, sets up the public/private split, and drops in the reference agent template:

python -m sia.prepare_mlebench_dataset -c "spaceship-titanic"
sia run --task_dir ./tasks/spaceship-titanic --max_gen 5 --run_id 1

Full step-by-step for both paths: docs/walkthrough.md.

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Evaluation

After every generation the orchestrator scores the target agent automatically and feeds the result into the next generation's feedback prompt — this is the signal the self-improvement loop optimizes against.

1. The target agent writes its output into the generation directory (e.g. gen_1/submission.csv).
2. The orchestrator runs the task's evaluator: python evaluate.py --gen-dir gen_1/.
3. evaluate.py scores the output against the held-out ground truth in data/private/ and writes gen_1/results.json (or evaluation_results.json).
4. Those metrics are injected into the feedback prompt and surfaced in context.md and the web dashboard (accuracy-across-generations chart, per-domain breakdown).

The four bundled tasks already ship an evaluator. For a custom task, drop an evaluate.py exposing an evaluate() function into data/public/ — it decides the submission format, compares against data/private/, and returns a metrics dict. Test it standalone before a full run:

python my-task/data/public/evaluate.py --gen-dir runs/run_1/gen_1   # should write results.json

Full contract, return-format rules, and a complete example: EVALUATION_GUIDE.md.

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Further reading

• docs/architecture.md — directory layout, generation flow, prompt customization
• docs/walkthrough.md — detailed custom-task walkthrough
• docs/configuration.md — agent impls, models, API keys, CLI reference
• EVALUATION_GUIDE.md — writing evaluate.py for a custom task
• docs/troubleshooting.md — common errors and fixes

Citation

If you use SIA in your research, please cite:

@article{hebbar2026sia,
  title   = {SIA: Self Improving AI with Harness \& Weight Updates},
  author  = {Hebbar, Prannay and Manawat, Yogendra and Verboomen, Samuel and Ivanova, Alesia and Palanimalai, Selvam and Bhatia, Kunal and Baskaran, Vignesh},
  journal = {arXiv preprint arXiv:2605.27276},
  year    = {2026},
  url     = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.27276}
}