arXiv AI

DemoEvolve: Demonstration-Guided Harness Evolution under Sparse Feedback

arXiv AI
Jul 31

Living-Harness Is an Interactive-Agent Evolver

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 Machine Learning
Aug 4

HarnessCompass: Guiding Automatic Harness Evolution toward Generalizable and Effective Agent Harnesses

arXiv:2608. 01918v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Harness design plays a critical role in agent performance by shaping how large language models (LLMs) perceive, reason over, and act within executable environments.

By Luan Zhang, Ruochen Zhou, Dandan Song, Zhengyu Chen, Yuhang Tian, Jun Yang, Huipeng Ma, Chenhao Li, Guangyuan Feng, Xudong Li, Yizhou Jin, Yan Xu
arXiv AI
Aug 28

Verify Smarter, Evolve Further: Efficient Harness Evolution through Behavior-Aware Verification

The paper introduces HarnessLens, a budget‑aware framework that evolves language‑model agent harnesses by jointly exploring task spaces and user‑configurable components. It derives candidate modifications from execution trajectories and selectively verifies them on behavior‑relevant tasks using an attributable‑evidence gate, thereby avoiding wasteful rollouts on unrelated behaviors. Experiments on three harnesses and four benchmarks show that HarnessLens improves held‑out performance by 7.6‑13.6% while using less evaluation budget than existing methods.

By Jinghan Xu, Yikai Zhang, Aili Chen, Weiyuan Li, Jiaqing Liang, Deqing Yang
arXiv AI
Jun 15

HarnessX: A Composable, Adaptive, and Evolvable Agent Harness Foundry

arXiv:2606. 14249v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: AI agent performance depends critically on the runtime harness, comprising the prompts, tools, memory, and control flow that mediate how a model observes, reasons, and acts.

By Tingyang Chen, Shuo Lu, Kang Zhao, Weicheng Meng, Hanlin Teng, Tianhao Li, Chao Li, Xule Liu, Jian Liang, Zhizhong Zhang, Yuan Xie, Heng Qu, Kun Shao, Jian Luan
arXiv AI
2d ago

Learning from Research: Toward Lifelong Agent Harness Evolution

The paper introduces ScholarEvolve, a framework that evolves the software harness of language agents by automatically incorporating insights from recent research papers. It organizes harness improvements into functional modules, uses topic modeling to identify distinct strategies, and evaluates combinations to boost task performance. Experiments show significant gains on AppWorld and Tau2-Bench, raising Qwen3.5-27B completion rates from 49.6% to 63.6% and GPT-5.4-mini pass@1 from 72.7% to 81.9%.

By Jingbo Yang, Kwei-Herng Lai, Xiaowen Wang, Yaar Harari, Evgeniy Gabrilovich, Shiyu Chang
arXiv AI
2d ago

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