Forage V2: Knowledge Evolution and Transfer in Autonomous Agent Organizations
This work addresses reliability and efficiency issues for autonomous agents in open-world environments, offering an incremental architectural improvement over prior methods.
The paper tackles the problem of denominator blindness in autonomous agents performing open-world tasks by introducing Forage V2, an architecture that enables knowledge accumulation and transfer across runs, resulting in stabilized domain understanding and reduced performance gaps between agents.
Autonomous agents operating in open-world tasks -- where the completion boundary is not given in advance -- face denominator blindness: they systematically underestimate the scope of the target space. Forage V1 addressed this through co-evolving evaluation (an independent Evaluator discovers what "complete" means) and method isolation (Evaluator and Planner cannot see each other's code). V2 extends the architecture from a single expedition to a learning organization: experience accumulates across runs, transfers across model capabilities, and institutional safeguards prevent knowledge degradation. We demonstrate two claims across three task types (web scraping, API queries, mathematical reasoning). Knowledge accumulation: over six runs, knowledge entries grow from 0 to 54, and denominator estimates stabilize as domain understanding deepens. Knowledge transfer: a weaker agent (Sonnet) seeded with a stronger agent's (Opus) knowledge narrows a 6.6pp coverage gap to 1.1pp, halves cost (9.40 to 5.13 USD), converges in half the rounds (mean 4.5 vs. 7.0), and three independent seeded runs arrive at exactly the same denominator estimate (266), suggesting organizational knowledge calibrates evaluation itself. V2's contribution is architectural: it designs institutions -- audit separation, contract protocols, organizational memory -- that make any agent more reliable upon entry. The accumulated experience is organizational, model-agnostic, and transferable, stored as readable documents that any future agent inherits regardless of provider or capability level.