ML Seminar · Tuesday, October 06, 2026
Haonan Wang
Columbia University
Towards Recursive Self-Improvement: Lessons from Self-Evolving Reinforcement Learning
Haonan Wang · Columbia University
Can language models sustain improvement by generating their own training tasks? This talk explores the promise of recursive self-improvement through a systematic study of self-evolving reinforcement learning. We discuss what current approaches achieve, what our findings reveal about the limits of that progress, and why the results so far do not establish a sustained cycle of self-improvement. We will also discuss possible directions for addressing these limitations.
About the speaker
Haonan Wang is a PhD student in Computer Science at Columbia University, advised by Eugene Wu. His research spans language model post-training and data systems, with a recent focus on recursive self-improvement.