MetaShare: Failure-Aware Collective Self-Improvement for Open-Ended Agents

Abstract: Humans often learn fastest not by repeating success, but by remembering which failures not to repeat. Open-ended self-improving agents can share experience across lineages, as in GEA, or edit their own improvement mechanisms, as in DGM-Hyperagents, yet failed improvement attempts are rarely retained as reusable cross-branch knowledge, and search can collapse onto redundant strategies. We introduce MetaShare, a failure-aware framework that records successful and unsuccessful agent modifications together with signed performance deltas. Before each generation, MetaShare retrieves diverse high-performing strategies alongside high-confidence failures from other lineages, letting agents reuse effective mechanisms while avoiding known dead ends. A task-blind auditor periodically injects absent or underrepresented mechanism categories, while embedding-based de-ranking limits redundancy during retrieval. Multiple meta-agents propose modifications in parallel at heterogeneous temperatures behind a deterministic selector that gates applicability, scope, compilability, and size. Experiments across paper review, coding, math grading, robotics reward design, and financial audit-risk assessment show that MetaShare's median matches or exceeds DGM-Hyperagents' final performance and reaches its own best-performing agent in 1.7--2.9$\times$ fewer evolution iterations.