Self-Evolving Agent Harness
arXiv:2610.18813v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Harness self-evolution revises an agent's software scaffolding, including prompts, memory, workflows, and executable components, while keeping model we...
The paper introduces the Self‑Evolving Agent Harness, a framework that allows an agent’s software scaffolding—prompts, memory, workflows, and executable components—to evolve while keeping the underlying model weights unchanged. It formalizes a feedback‑driven process where accepted revisions persist across runs, separating update targets from proposal and admission mechanisms, and distinguishes changes to interpreted state from revisions to tools and code. The authors analyze evolutionary search, provide generalization and retention bounds under PAC‑learning assumptions, and discuss the impact of persistent harness revisions on knowledge sharing, organizational workflows, and broader implications for scientific reliability, safety, and accountability.
arXiv:2610.18813v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Harness self-evolution revises an agent's software scaffolding, including prompts, memory, workflows, and executable components, while keeping model we...
HarnessEvolve is a self‑evolving framework that improves agent harnesses—prompts, skills, tools, and execution logic—by learning from reference trajectories. It separates execution, evaluation, optimization, and gating into independent modules, addressing credit assignment failure, shortcut learning, and catastrophic forgetting. The approach uses reference trajectories to extract error signals, applies quality and performance gates to candidate updates, and validates updates on held‑out data, consistently outperforming state‑of‑the‑art baselines across diverse benchmarks.
arXiv:2609.08175v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Harness self-evolution is the process by which an agent modifies its prompts, tools, code, or orchestration in response to task feedback while keeping...
arXiv:2607. 13285v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The capability of a modern AI agent depends not only on its foundation model but also on its harness, which constructs prompts, manages state, invokes tools, and coordinates execution.
arXiv:2608. 04968v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The capabilities of an LLM agent depend not only on its model but on the harness: the executable program that constructs context, invokes tools, verifies results, and recovers from failure.
arXiv:2606. 05922v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: AI agents rely on a harness of skills, tools, and workflows to solve complex problems.
arXiv:2603. 20667v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Existing prompt-optimization techniques rely on local signals, causing poor generalization across tasks.
The paper introduces Regularized Recursive Self-Improvement of Agent Harnesses (RRSI), a method that applies regularization principles to the iterative editing of an LLM agent’s harness—prompts, control flow, tooling, memory, and context management. RRSI limits the number of edits per candidate, encourages novel trajectories, and uses a critic and pruner to filter out benchmark‑specific or ineffective changes, thereby favoring reusable agent mechanisms. Experiments on eight benchmarks show RRSI improves performance by up to 14.1 points on the training split and 4.7 points on out‑of‑distribution tests, while reducing policy token usage by 30% compared to unregularized evolution.
Harness-Bench is a diagnostic benchmark that evaluates how different harness configurations affect LLM agent performance in realistic workflows. It tests 106 sandboxed offline tasks across multiple model backends, recording artifacts, execution traces, and usage statistics to analyze completion, process quality, efficiency, and failure behavior. The study finds significant variation in outcomes across model-harness pairings, indicating that agent capability should be reported at the configuration level rather than solely by the base model.
arXiv:2607. 08124v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The behavior of an LLM agent is determined not only by the underlying model, but also by its harness: the executable program that constructs context, invokes tools, verifies intermediate results, and recovers from failures.
arXiv:2606. 17546v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Self-evolving LLM-based agents improve mainly by changing their agent harness: the structured execution layer around a base model, including prompts, memory, tools, middleware, runtime state, and the model-tool interaction loop.
AI agents rely on a harness of skills, tools, and workflows to solve complex problems. Continually improving this harness is essential for adapting to new tasks.