Beyond Endpoint Performance: Process-Level Evaluation of Self-Evolving Agents

Abstract

Self-evolving agents convert interaction feedback into persistent artifacts, such as memories or skills, which in turn guide subsequent decisions. As these artifacts are iteratively updated throughout an experience stream, the capabilities they support may evolve. Consequently, endpoint performance alone offers an incomplete view of self-evolution. Process-level evaluation is therefore essential to identify when a target capability emerges and whether later updates strengthen, preserve, or weaken it. Motivated by this, we propose \textsc{EvoPathBench}, a benchmark that tracks individual capabilities during artifact-level self-evolution. EvoPathBench fixes the base model, tools, freezes evolving artifacts at successive checkpoints, and evaluates the target capability on held-out episodes. This benchmark evaluates agent self-evolution using public trading data and calibrated trajectories. It tests three capabilities: generalization to unseen tasks, retention after unrelated learning, and rule adaptation to new evidence. Experimental results show that gains on similar unseen tasks often weaken under distribution shift, retention losses are concentrated in a minority of evolution paths, and no method achieves reliable rule adaptation. Moreover, while self-evolution enables agents to generate candidate artifacts with substantial held-out gains, the selected updates consistently fall short of realizing this potential. Together, these findings establish capability-level process evaluation as a foundation for analyzing self-evolution, identifying candidate evaluation and selection as key targets for improvement.