loop

Definition

A repeated cycle that runs until some condition is met. For agents the core structure is the act–observe–decide loop, which is what separates an agent from a single generation call. The word also appears in human-in-the-loop, where a person reviews or approves steps, and in self-improvement loops where a model critiques and revises its own output. In all senses it flags iteration, along with the questions iteration raises: termination, cost, and error accumulation.

Explainers using this term

• Paper Walkthrough: PILOT in the Loop — Fixing the Run While It Is Still RunningPILOT in the Loop: Live Self-Improvement for Long-Horizon Agents
• Paper Walkthrough: LoopArena — Benchmarking the Model That Steers a Coding AgentLoopArena: Benchmarking Models as Runtime Controllers for Loop Engineering
• Paper walkthrough: Zetta ζ — a robot harness that repairs itself mid-execution, with the policy frozenZetta $ζ$: An Efficient Closed-Loop Embodied Harness for Self-Evolving Physical Intelligence