Bay Area Frontier Research Club #19 | Agents in Production: ICML 2026 Oral by UC Berkeley Researchers + Self-Improvement Fireside

Two UC Berkeley researchers surveyed teams deploying agents across dozens of application domains, then paired the results with in-depth case studies of how those systems are actually built, evaluated, and operated.
The findings are unusually concrete.
Melissa Pan and Negar Arabzadeh, co-lead authors of Measuring Agents in Production, will present the work jointly in a twenty-minute talk.
Then we test the implication.
If reliability is the bottleneck, self-improvement looks like the obvious next move: let an agent optimize itself against an evaluation. But evaluations are proxies, and proxies…

Hosted by Kristopher Floyd & Kunal Bhatia