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.
By Yilun Yao, Xinyu Tan, Chao-Hsuan Liu, Yaoming Li, Zhengyang Wang, Zongwei Lv, Wenhan Yu, Zhewen Tan, Yuxuan Tian, Lin Sun, Xiangzheng Zhang, Guangxiang Zhao, Tong Yang
arXiv:2610.03153v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: Workspace agents combine large language models with execution harnesses to perform stateful, multi-step tasks that access or modify external resource...
By Shiyi Kuang, Xuemei Luo, Kun Liu, Junhai Li, Rui Tian, Feng Shi, Bo Shen, Nianyu Li, Dehui Li, Ping Chen
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...
By Chuyang Wei, Haoxiang Guan, Minghang Zhu, Kexin Zhou, Jiyan He, Xiren Zhou, Huanhuan Chen, Yifei Shen
arXiv:2610.39468v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: AI coding agents now do long, multi-step and multi-session software work with little supervision. When a developer comes back to that work, the usefu...
By Mohammed Nayeem Khan, K S Sarun Kumar
The paper introduces the Agent-Editing World Model (AEWM), a new approach that models how reasoning and actions influence future task progress instead of simulating tool responses. AEWM includes an Action Judge that classifies decisions as Critical, Exploratory, or Noisy, and a State Revision mechanism that edits noisy reasoning–action continuations from the same observed history. The integrated system, EditAct, directly updates the underlying state during real execution, leading to significant performance gains across multiple benchmarks and agent backbones.
By Shuang Sun, Guoxin Chen, Fanzhe Meng, Jia Deng, Huatong Song, Jinhao Jiang, Wayne Xin Zhao, Hongteng Xu, Ji-Rong Wen
Software-agent benchmarks usually report whether an agent solves a task, but the agent reaches that outcome through a harness that controls what it sees, which actions it can take, which failures are repaired, which states are verified, and which evidence is logged. We show that this harness can change the agent's multi-step beliefs even when the task, environment, and base LLM are fixed.
arXiv:2607. 26598v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large language model (LLM) agents may recover from a failure within an episode or after a retry, yet the same execution failure can recur in later tasks because post-episode feedback rarely revises the persistent harness that guides future interactions.
By Yuetian Du, Yucheng Wang, He Xu, Jiexu Xu, Shanwen Tan, Bing Zhao, Boyu Yang, Zhijie Xu, Ming Kong, Hu Wei, Jie Liu, Qiang Zhu
arXiv:2607. 11388v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) and vision-language models (VLMs) have enabled increasingly capable digital agents for computer use.
By Wenyi Wu, Sibo Zhu, Kun Zhou, Aayush Salvi, Zixuan Song, Biwei Huang
arXiv:2607. 04528v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Software-agent benchmarks usually report whether an agent solves a task, but the agent reaches that outcome through a harness that controls what it sees, which actions it can take, which failures are repaired, which states are verified, and which evidence is logged.
By Haiwen Yi, Xinyuan Song
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.
EvoBelief is a self‑evolving world model that represents environment knowledge as falsifiable hypotheses, allowing an LLM agent to update its beliefs during deployment. The system generates hypotheses when unexpected outcomes or unknowns arise, validates them through observations and controlled experiments, and then uses the confirmed rules to guide predictions or plans. Across benchmarks such as ALFWorld, MiniGrid, and DiscoveryWorld, EvoBelief improves task performance, revises stale rules, and discovers quantitative laws, outperforming baseline frozen world models.
By Janet Wang, Jiang Guo, Yi Xiang, Jiaqing Yuan, Mingwen Dong, Hideo Kobayashi, Shuaichen Chang, Chandan K. Reddy, Jiarong Jiang
arXiv:2609.24165v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Synchrotron data reduction, detector calibration followed by azimuthal integration of terabyte-scale diffraction series, is a multi-step, expert-bound...
By Pawan K. Tripathi, Hemant Sharma, Andrew Chuang, Mathew J. Cherukara