RECAP: Regression Evaluation for Continual Adaptation of Prompts

Abstract

Production agentic systems routinely face evolving constraints and must comply from the very next interaction. Scenarios like a tool-call notification changing a compliance threshold or a policy update adding disclosure requirements fit this criteria, having close to no room for errors in production. This proactive adaptation setting is common in deployment, but absent from current benchmarks, which assume either static constraint sets or reactive protocols with evaluation feedback. We introduce RECAP, a benchmark that measures continual-learning phenomena (forgetting, regression, forward transfer) at the constraint level under a strictly proactive adapt-then-test protocol: prompt optimization methods receive only the constraint specification and must generalize before seeing any test data. Evaluating six methods across four LLMs and three schedules with evolving constraints, we find that these methods show no significant improvement in performance, even after incurring a higher latency. These methods, designed for offline or reactive settings, are inadequate for the proactive paradigm. Our work emphasizes the growing need for designing proactive prompt adaptation methods, where the models must remain robust to evolving needs in deployment.