arXiv:2608. 07346v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: With the rapid advancement of large language models (LLMs), harnesses have become essential infrastructure for deploying agents across a wide range of domains.
arXiv:2608. 07346v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: With the rapid advancement of large language models (LLMs), harnesses have become essential infrastructure for deploying agents across a wide range of domains.
Harbor Adapters is a unified evaluation infrastructure that ports over 80 agentic benchmarks, enabling arbitrary agents to be tested across complex environments. The authors performed a large‑scale evaluation of 8 models on 54 benchmarks, using Terminus‑2 and three native harnesses, revealing detailed agent capabilities and failure modes. They also created Harbor‑Index, a curated set of 82 challenging tasks from 29 benchmarks, designed to be affordable yet comprehensive, with the best model achieving a 28.0% pass rate.
UniACE is a unified framework that standardizes the evaluation of large language model (LLM) agents by representing each benchmark as an instruction–tool–environment triplet and running models through a shared, task‑agnostic harness in isolated runtimes. It preserves native success criteria, offers an offline mode for dynamic‑resource tasks, and standardizes efficiency metrics, execution records, and failure attribution. Applying UniACE to 7 benchmarks across 24 domains and 15 models revealed significant score shifts, ranking reversals, and sensitivity to evidence representation, highlighting the impact of evaluation configuration on reported agent performance.
arXiv:2607. 13705v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: As Large Language Models (LLMs) evolve into autonomous agents, the need for unified evaluation infrastructure becomes critical.
arXiv:2609.06059v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: As large language models evolve from question-answering systems into general-purpose agents, evaluation must move beyond static answer correctness to a...
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.
As Large Language Models (LLMs) evolve into autonomous agents, the need for unified evaluation infrastructure becomes critical. However, current evaluation pipelines remain highly fragmented and tightly coupled, hindering reproducibility and causing redundant engineering.
The paper presents EvalAgent, an AI assistant that automates agent evaluation by encoding domain expertise into evaluation skills such as procedural instructions, reusable code, and dynamic API retrieval. EvalAgent constructs a trace-based pipeline that outputs metrics, executable code, and reports, and is evaluated using a new meta-evaluation framework and AgentEvalBench. Results show that EvalAgent improves the Eval@1 metric from 17.5% to 65% and receives 79.5% human expert preference, while ablation studies confirm the importance of evaluation skills.
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...
arXiv:2602. 22480v4 Announce Type: replace Abstract: An important emerging application of coding agents is agent harness optimization: the iterative improvement of a target agent by editing and evaluating its code.
The paper introduces Harness Primitives—reusable agent harness mechanisms mined from failed task trajectories—and a framework called STITCH that selects and composes these primitives into task‑specific harnesses at test time. This approach avoids generating or debugging harness code for each task, achieving up to 12‑point gains in task success over fixed harness baselines and outperforming human‑designed harnesses like Codex CLI. STITCH also demonstrates minimal test‑time overhead (2.7%) and scales efficiently with the size of the primitive library.
Large language model (LLM) agents are increasingly evaluated on their ability to use tools, plan multi-step tasks, coordinate with other agents, and operate over extended horizons. Reported benchmark gains often obscure recurring failure modes documented across otherwise unrelated evaluation efforts.