arXiv Machine Learning

HarnessPro: Recursive Harness Self-Improvement with Pareto Optimization for Performance-Cost Trade-offs

arXiv AI
Aug 7

HarnessOpt-Bench: Evaluating LLMs at Harness Optimization

arXiv:2608. 06301v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: As LLMs are increasingly deployed within agentic systems, their capabilities depend not only on the model weights but also on the harness: the prompts, tools, control flow, memory, and orchestration code surrounding them.

By Varun Ursekar, Apaar Shanker, Yash Maurya, Shehab Yasser, Vijay S. Kalmath, Veronica Chatrath, Yuan Xue
arXiv AI
Oct 1

Self-Evolving Harness on Multiple Tasks with the Agent as Its Own Optimizer

The paper introduces a self‑evolving harness framework where a frozen language‑model agent first solves tasks and then edits its own harness based on run records. Using a 49‑line seed harness, the evolved harness improves average scores on in‑distribution benchmarks by 4.48 points and on out‑of‑distribution benchmarks by 12.64 points, surpassing Codex on the former and matching it on the latter. Continued evolution on a specific out‑of‑distribution benchmark further raises performance, and the study analyzes emergent mechanisms such as output truncation and history compaction.

By Qiankai Xu
arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 2

HarnessDev: Can LLMs Create and Evolve Their Own Agent Harness?

arXiv:2609.01437v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: As agents move from research prototypes to deployed tools, their capability increasingly depends on model-external execution infrastructure, commonly...

By Yuhao Wu, Jingyuan Zhang, Jiajun Shi, Xinping Lei, Qingshui Gu, Yuxuan Zhang, Zexuan Wang, Chen He, Chen Huang, Maojia Song, Zhiyuan Zeng, Shaowen Wang, Jinkai Liu, Yunfeng Shi, Jiaheng Liu, Shen Yan, Wenhao Huang, Ge Zhang, Wenxuan Zhang
arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 15

ModularRSI: Modular and Generalizable Recursive Harness Self-Improvement

arXiv:2609.14857v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Recent work extends recursive self-improvement (RSI) to agent harnesses for long-horizon coding and terminal tasks, enabling agents to improve executio...

By Siwei Wu, Jincheng Ren, Yizhi Li, Haau-Sing Li, Chengran Yang, Yuxuan Zhang, Weicheng Gu, Jian Yang, Riza Batista-Navarro, Chuanyi Zhang, Xianglong Liu, Ming Zhou, Bryan Dai, Chenghua Lin
arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 22

RRSI: Regularized Recursive Self-Improvement of Agent Harnesses

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.

By Peng Xia, Rujun Han, Zifeng Wang, Yanfei Chen, Yufan Zhang, Yoonho Lee, Chengsong Huang, Han Yu, Zhongying CuiZhu, Yifei Ming, Huaxiu Yao, Burak Gokturk, Tomas Pfister, Chen-Yu Lee
arXiv AI
Sep 18

SoL-Pi: Recursively Scaling Auto-Research Loops for Efficient Agent Harness

arXiv:2609. 20519v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: As coding agents move from supervised code completion to unattended, around-the-clock exploration, their work expands from isolated predictions into long trajectories of reasoning, tool use, and feedback.

By Haozhe Liu, Tian Ye, Sensen Gao, Qihang Cao, Yitong Li, Mingchen Zhuge, Duomin Wang, Ruihua Zhang, Ping Luo, Jiawang Bian, Lei Zhu, Ligeng Zhu, Enze Xie, Song Han