arXiv AI

Terminal Agents: A Survey of AI Agents in Command-Line Environments

The paper surveys AI agents that operate primarily through command-line terminals, defining them as systems whose main action loop involves executing terminal commands, receiving textual feedback, and interacting with a stateful environment. It introduces a seven‑dimensional terminal competence profile to link system architecture, learning, and evaluation, and highlights how behavior is jointly shaped by the model, interface, harness, runtime, and environment. The authors argue for explicit reporting of system and runtime conditions, supported by replayable traces and process‑level evidence, to better understand and benchmark terminal‑mediated agency.

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
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 Computation and Language
Oct 12

Scaling Agentic Data for Long-Horizon Terminal Intelligence

The paper introduces TerminalHorizon, an automated engine that synthesizes long‑horizon trajectories for terminal agents by reconstructing environments from real‑world professional work and progressively expanding tasks to require further exploration and improvement. Using this engine, the authors create 1.5K task environments and fine‑tune Qwen3.5‑27B, producing TerminalHorizon‑27B, which shows significant performance gains across 12 benchmarks in coding, agentic production tasks, and reasoning. Case studies demonstrate the model’s ability to experiment beyond initial solutions, refine methods based on feedback, and preserve effective improvements in final deliverables.

By Shun Zou, Ziyu Ma, Yi Zou, Yong Wang, Lin Chen, Zehui Chen, Guanhua Chen, Xiangxiang Chu, Feng Zhao
arXiv AI
Aug 20

FACET: Preserving Source Intent and Executable State in Terminal Task Synthesis

FACET is a framework for synthesizing terminal tasks that preserves source intent and ensures cross‑artifact consistency. It reconstructs agent skills into coherent scenarios, repairs the execution environment, and uses the resulting container state as shared grounding for the instruction, solution, and verifier. By validating and repairing artifacts through execution, FACET produces complex tasks with dense executable checks and data‑efficient supervision, improving performance on Terminal‑Bench 2.1.

By Kou Shi, Zun Wang, Qisheng Su, Shiting Huang, Ziao Zhang, Zhen Fang, Qingnan Ren, Jin Liu, Yu Zeng, Yiming Zhao, Lin Chen, Zehui Chen, Feng Zhao
arXiv AI
3d ago

Trial by Trace: Benchmarking AI Agent Harnesses for Reliability and Failure Attribution

The paper introduces TraceTrial-Bench, a benchmark that evaluates the reliability of AI agent harnesses across seven components—context, execution, governance, lifecycle, observability, tools, and verification—using 95 expert-level tasks with executable or state-based ground truth. It employs a Trajectory Tracing module to record agent execution, a two-layer evaluation framework to separately assess agent performance and harness reliability, and a Multi-source Evidence Acquisition module to gather evidence for LLM-based evaluation. The benchmark’s analysis of 3,420 runs across four harnesses and nine models shows harness scores between 59.8% and 72.0%, with 31.1% of runs succeeding despite failing at least one harness criterion, highlighting the need for auditable and reproducible harness evaluation.

By Zhiyong Cao, Hengjie Zhu, Yongxin Wang, Xuchen Li, Jintao Li, Shuxia Liu, Dunqiang Liu, Bo Wang, Kairan Zhang, Cong Lin, JiangDi Yu, Siyuan Liu, Sijia Yao, Yi-Liang Wei, Lingxu Ma, Aijia Wang, Anxin Chen, Zixian Wei, Xiang Ruan, Ruizhi Xu, Ruqian Shi, Baihua Xiao, Sicheng Zhou
arXiv AI
Sep 4

Terminal-Universe: Turning Agent Trajectories into Scalable Terminal Environments

Terminal-Universe is a framework that transforms large collections of terminal‑based agent trajectories into reusable, executable environments. By replaying recorded file operations and completing missing files, it reconstructs the original workspace and task, then synthesizes new tasks and multi‑round interactions. The resulting 37.3k task‑sufficient environments enable significant performance gains when fine‑tuning language models on terminal‑based benchmarks.

By Jie Wu, Zhenru Zhang, Beichen Zhang, Xuwu Wang, Yuhui Su, Mouxiang Chen, Peng Wang, Zhihai Wang, Que Shen, Hao Zhou, An Yang, Fei Huang, Yujiu Yang, Dayiheng Liu
arXiv AI
Jun 3

What Makes Interaction Trajectories Effective for Training Terminal Agents?

arXiv:2606. 03461v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Stronger code agents are commonly assumed to be superior teachers for post-training, yet this assumption remains poorly disentangled from task difficulty, harness design, and student capacity.

By Sidi Yang, Chaofan Tao, Jierun Chen, Tiezheng Yu, Ruoyu Wang, Yuxin Jiang, Yiming Du, Wendong Xu, Jing Xiong, Taiqiang Wu, Lifeng Shang, Xiaohui Li, Ngai Wong, Haoli Bai