NeoHorse-1: Towards Recursive Self-Improvement via Agentic Post-Training with Routing Harness

NeoHorse Team, Guoliang Cao, Guohao Dai, Tianyu Guo, Kai Han +32 more
9/8/2026
cs.CL

No official code found. Best implementation: TokenRhythm/NeoHorse (92 stars, Apache-2.0, last commit 2026-09-09).

Abstract

Recursive self-improvement (RSI) requires a concrete mechanism through which an AI system observes its capabilities and converts that evidence into the next round of learning. We present NeoHorse-1, a family of agent-native models developed to explore this path through agentic post-training. Our system combines a heterogeneous model pool with intelligent routing, recording the predicted capability demand, selected service tier, and subsequent interaction for each user turn. These records are converted into training examples that preserve interleaved reasoning, tool calls, and harness context, and are admitted through structural validation, six-dimensional semantic evaluation, and subscene-level labeling. Routing signals organize supervised fine-tuning into a three-stage curriculum and extend to routing-guided on-policy distillation, where a teacher supervises student-generated responses under the same progression. Capability-guided allocation then converts evaluation feedback into the next training mixture, closing an evaluation-selection-update loop in which what the system learns to do shapes what it learns from next. Across eleven benchmarks covering harness-based agents, tool use, coding, and instruction following, post-training raises the macro-average from 58.94 to 64.87 at 4B and from 65.60 to 69.04 at 9B, substantially narrowing the aggregate gap between the post-trained 4B model and the 9B base model. NeoHorse-1 provides an initial prototype of this feedback-driven process and a path toward harness-mediated RSI across successive iterations.

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Code Implementations(1)

Apache-2.0

NeoHorse-1: Towards Recursive Self-Improvement via Agentic Post-Training with Routing Harness.

921Sep 4, 20261 months agoApache-2.0
agentlarge-language-modelsllmpost-trainingrecursive-self-improvement+1 more

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Cite this paper

@article{team2026neohorse,
  title  = {NeoHorse-1: Towards Recursive Self-Improvement via Agentic Post-Training with Routing Harness},
  author = {NeoHorse Team and Guoliang Cao and Guohao Dai and Tianyu Guo and Kai Han and Hailin Hu and Zihan Jiang and Xiang Kuang and Boxun Li and Yulong Li and Zehua Pei and Yuchuan Tian and Jiamin Wang and Yu Wang and Yunhe Wang and Yihong Wu and Haiyang Xu and Shuo Zhang and Hang Zhou and Siyang Cheng and Jiayu Fan and Wei He and Qingrui Jiao and Hongguang Li and Zhiyuan Li and Runke Liu and Xi Liu and Xinchen Liu and Sinno Jialin Pan and Yi Ren and Liuyang Song and Chenyu Wang and Bei Yu and Quanlu Zhang and Xiangyu Zhang and Mengyu Zheng and Yingjie Zong},
  year   = {2026},
  eprint = {2609.08183},
  archivePrefix = {arXiv},
  url    = {http://arxiv.org/abs/2609.08183v1}
}

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