The Blind Curator: How a Biased Judge Silently Disables Skill Retirement in Self-Evolving Agents

Excerpt

arXiv:2607.07436v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: A self-evolving agent retires its bad skills by watching them fail, so what happens when the judge cannot see the failures? Skill retirement is the structural constraint that keeps a growing library from drifting below the no-skill baseline, but its guarantee assumes an unbiased reward, which is false for the LLM judges that reference-free tasks require. We show that a biased judge does not merely add noise; it \emph{silently switches off