Building with Agents

Recursive Self-Improvement

About the track

AI systems can increasingly self-evaluate and modify parts of their own prompts, tools, memory, code, data, and workflows based on feedback. The unresolved question is how to make sure these feedback loops produce genuine, repeatable improvement rather than benchmark overfitting or unstable changes. This track is for researchers and senior engineers experimenting with agents, automated research systems, or iterative model-improvement pipelines.

Talks cover definitions and levels of recursive self-improvement; generate–evaluate–select loops for system modification; modification of prompts, tools, memory, code, data, and models; measurement, credit assignment, regressions, and benchmark overfitting; and sandboxing, oversight, stopping conditions, and control boundaries. Expect discussion of the tradeoffs involved, experiments happening at the frontier, and a sober view of current limitations. Attendees will understand how to distinguish RSI from ordinary iterative optimization, and how to design self-improvement loops with hard-to-hack metrics and stopping conditions.
Notes: Nothing to fact-check. Suhas’s text used as written; the hook is his first two sentences, lightly shortened.

Track host

Suhas Pai

Co-Founder & CTO, Hudson Labs

Suhas Pai is a NLP researcher and co-founder/CTO at Hudson Labs, a Toronto based Y-combinator backed startup. He is the author of the book ‘Designing Large Language Model Applications’, published by O’Reilly Media. He has contributed to the development of several open-source LLMs over the years and published a variety of independent research. Suhas is active in the ML community, being Chair of the TMLS (Toronto Machine Learning Summit) conference since 2021. He is also a frequent speaker at AI conferences worldwide, and hosts regular seminars discussing the latest research in the field of NLP.

Sessions in this track

Friday, November 6th | 2:05 PM – 2:35 PM

Take Back the AI Story

Seema Lakhani

COO & CPO,

Devin

Friday, November 6th | 2:05 PM – 2:35 PM

Recursive Self-Improvement

Shashank Shekhar

Research Engineer,

Google DeepMind

Friday, November 6th | 1:30 PM – 2:00 PM

Lairkit: Sovereign Software Forge and Deploys Simplified

Alex Tucker

Software Engineer,

49ops

Friday, November 6th | 1:30 PM – 2:00 PM

When Self-Improving Agents Learn the Wrong Lessons

Abhimanyu Anand

Senior Data Scientist,

Elastic

Friday, November 6th | 11:45 AM – 12:30 PM

How to Measure Success for your AI Agents

Manav Shah

Founding ML Engineer,

raindrop.ai

Thursday, November 5th | 4:30 PM – 5:00 PM

The Boring Stuff Still Breaks Your Agents

Jen Barnes-Nolan

Founder & Senior AI Advisor,

JenAI Consulting

Thursday, November 5th | 2:20 PM – 2:50 PM

Beyond Prompt Engineering: Engineering AI Skills for Continuous Validation and Cross-Learning

Kiana Haddadi

Data Scientist,

BMO Blue Rewards

Thursday, November 5th | 3:55 PM – 4:25 PM

From Supervision to Autonomy: Building Agents You Can Trust

Millin Gabani

Co-Founder & CEO,

Worklayer

Thursday, November 5th | 3:55 PM – 4:25 PM

Decision Models and Their Place in The Agentic Ecosystem

Suhas Pai

CTO & Co-Founder,

Hudson Labs

Thursday, November 5th | 3:55 PM – 4:25 PM

Decision Models and Their Place in The Agentic Ecosystem

Lily Ren

Co-Founder,

Fruitless Labs

Summit (2 days).

Toronto Summit · Presented by TMLS · Nov 5–6, 2026 · RBC WaterPark Place, TorontoThe people building agents, and the people building with them – one room, on the Toronto waterfront. Two days of practitioner-curated talks on what actually ships: the stack underneath agentic systems, and the products, workflows, and agents teams are running in production right now.

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