arXiv Computation and Language

Is Bash All You Need? An Empirical Study of Tool Interfaces for Enterprise Digital Worker Agents

arXiv AI
Jun 30

TUA-Bench: A Benchmark for General-Purpose Terminal-Use Agents

arXiv:2606. 28480v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: As large language models and harness frameworks continue to advance, agents operating in terminals are increasingly capable of performing a broader range of general computer-use tasks beyond coding.

By Shoufa Chen, Luyuan Wang, Xuan Yang, Zhiheng Liu, Yuren Cong, Yuanfeng Ji, Feiyan Zhou, Xiaohui Zhang, Fanny Yang, Belinda Zeng
arXiv AI
Sep 18

An Empirical Study of Harness Design for Coding Agents

The study investigates how individual components of a coding harness—planning, action space, and context management—affect autonomous coding agents’ performance. By fixing the execution loop and varying these components across 176 settings on SWE‑Bench Verified and Terminal‑Bench 2.1, the authors find that context management is most valuable when context windows are tight, staging rule‑based elision before LLM summarization yields the best efficiency, planning serves as an accuracy scaffold for weaker models and a cost saver for stronger ones, and predefined tools help models with limited bash skills while bash‑capable models benefit from a bash‑only interface. Trajectory‑level analysis shows that context management lengthens execution paths, planning alters where trajectories terminate, and the action space determines code granularity, offering a modular framework for future harness design.

By Run-Ze Fan, Zihao Zhang, Simin Ma, Yebowen Hu, Shouju Wang, Kaiqiang Song, Fei Liu, Hamed Zamani, Xiaoyang Wang
arXiv AI
Aug 6

Terminal Agents Suffice for Enterprise Automation

arXiv:2604. 00073v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: There has been growing interest in building agents that can interact with digital platforms to execute meaningful enterprise tasks autonomously.

By Patrice Bechard, Orlando Marquez Ayala, Emily Chen, Jordan Skelton, Sagar Davasam, Srinivas Sunkara, Vikas Yadav, Sai Rajeswar
arXiv Machine Learning
Oct 28

AT-AT: Automatic Tool Optimization from Agent Traces

AT-AT (Automatic Tool Optimization from Agent Traces) is an agentic tool optimizer that improves shared toolsets offline using historical agent executions while keeping agents unchanged. It employs a lightweight coding agent to read agent trajectories and evaluation results, selectively editing tool descriptions and implementations when allowed. In benchmarks, AT-AT achieves the highest task completion rates in Airline and Telecom domains at lower cost than strong baselines, and it also improves performance on TerminalBench-2 and TBLite, while reducing cost or error rates on production MCP servers.

By Maya Ravichandran, Pragya Tripathi, Dharamendra Kumar, Adith Swaminathan, Nathan Kallus
arXiv AI
Oct 1

OpenCollab: A Multi-Agent Coding Framework with Programmable Collaboration and Controllable Runtime

OpenCollab is a multi‑agent coding framework that unifies organization design, enforces experimental control on a shared runtime, and tracks execution via fine‑grained event streams. It introduces the metric Adherence to measure whether the declared organization is actually realized, showing that small configuration changes can shift adherence from 47.2% to 97.2%. Experiments demonstrate that a two‑coder workflow built on OpenCollab achieves new state‑of‑the‑art performance against mainstream harnesses while using the fewest tokens, and that a well‑designed organization can outperform strong existing harnesses.

By Chun-Wah Hsu, Kai Gong, Yu Wu, Xianhe Chen, Mengyang Liu, Jie Li, Hanyu Li, Zhixuan Liu, Naisheng Tang, Jiaying Chi, Ziheng Fan, Xuning He, Xiaokang Yang, Xue Jiang, Yihong Dong
arXiv AI
Sep 7

CUA-Universe: A Scalable and Dynamic Environment for Hybrid GUI+CLI Agents

CUA-Universe is a scalable environment-to-data pipeline that transforms real desktop software into hybrid GUI+CLI environments, enabling agents to coordinate visual inspection with command-line operations. It includes App-Forge for reproducible VMs and CLI surfaces, Task-Weave for generating diverse hybrid tasks, and Path-Steer for efficient rollouts and trajectory harvesting. Training on this data improves agent success and efficiency across multiple benchmarks, demonstrating the value of hybrid interaction.

By Haoting Shi, Wenhao Wang, Weicheng Fang, Yaozhong Liang, Tian Jin, Pengxiang Zhao, Guangyi Liu, Siheng Chen, Yanfeng Wang
arXiv AI
Oct 21

Harness Self-Evolution for Long-Horizon Terminal Agents

The paper introduces RiseHarness, a framework that iteratively refines agent harnesses while keeping model weights fixed. It uses successful and failed runs under the same configuration to analyze failures, combining agent trajectories with runtime monitor traces to understand interactions between model actions and execution components. The framework then searches other harness frameworks for relevant implementations, adapts them, and validates changes through behavioral checks and repeated task evaluation, ultimately integrating mechanisms from multiple frameworks to improve reliability across tasks.

By Ruhan Wang, Yucheng Shi, Zongxia Li, Junyao Yang, Zhongzhi Li, Yue Yu, Haitao Mi, Dongruo Zhou, Leoweiliang
arXiv AI
Jul 17

MCPEvol-Bench: Benchmarking LLM Agent Performance Across Dynamic Evolutions of MCP Servers

arXiv:2607. 14642v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: As Model Context Protocol (MCP) servers emerge as the core infrastructure for connecting LLMs with external tools, existing benchmarks leverage real-world MCP servers to evaluate LLM agents' tool-using capabilities.

By Huanxi Liu, Kun Hu, Jiaqi Liao, Qiang Wang, Pengfei Qian, YuanZhao Zhai, Dawei Feng, Bo Ding, Huaimin Wang