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: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:2608. 08466v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Modern LLM agents are often improved by modifying prompts, tools, or workflows manually, while the executable scaffold surrounding the model---the \emph{harness}---is typically treated as a fixed artifact after deployment.
By Tailin Zhou
EVOHARNESSBENCH is a new benchmark that tests how LLM-based agents handle changes in their tool, skill, and agent harnesses over time. It includes 17 deterministic harness streams with 802 tasks, 520 tools, 42 skills, and 62 agents, and evaluates agents in two settings: deployment evaluation and self‑evolving adaptation evaluation. The study finds that harness expansion can cause forgetting, adaptation gains are inconsistent, and preserving old competence does not always aid new capability adaptation, highlighting harness evolution as a distinct challenge for agent development.
By Zixuan Ke, Vaidehi Patil, Haizhou Shi, Yang Li, Ye Liu, Sarath Shekkizhar, Anurag Koul, Jiayu Wang, Xuan Phi Nguyen, Semih Yavuz, Mohit Bansal, Shafiq Joty
arXiv:2609.04280v2 Announce Type: replace-cross
Abstract: Modern LLM-based agents operate through a harness of tools, reusable skills, and specialist agents that shapes what they observe and what the...
By Zixuan Ke, Vaidehi Patil, Haizhou Shi, Yang Li, Ye Liu, Sarath Shekkizhar, Anurag Koul, Jiayu Wang, Xuan Phi Nguyen, Semih Yavuz, Mohit Bansal, Shafiq Joty
arXiv:2609.01481v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: This paper studies autonomous software development, in which LLM-based coding agents transform high-level requirements into complete, functional, and u...
By Haoyang Yan, Min-le Su, Hangfan Zhang, Zhanhao Li, Chen Zhang, Shao Zhang, Yang Chen, Lei Bai, Shuyue Hu
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:2606. 01770v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Auto-harness systems such as A-Evolve, GEPA, and Meta-Harness improve LLM agents by optimizing prompts, skills, tools, memories, and supporting infrastructure from execution feedback, but they are typically evaluated on fixed offline benchmarks.
By Zewen Liu, Zhan Shi, Yisi Sang, Bing He, Minhua Lin, Tianxin Wei, Dakuo Wang, Benoit Dumoulin, Wei Jin, Hanqing Lu
Agent Lightning v1.0 is a lightweight framework that enables harnessed agentic reinforcement learning, where the agent harness—managing tools, context, and control flow—directly participates in model post‑training. It supports arbitrary agent harnesses and addresses challenges such as retokenization, sample merging, and advantage calculation, providing a reproducible pipeline for instruction‑following, search, and coding agents. In experiments, RL training on 6K examples improved Qwen3.5‑9B’s performance on SWE‑bench from 41.8% to 56.4%.
By Zhiyuan He, Siwei Zhang, Zhiwen Zhou, Yuqing Yang, Yu Kang, Yuge Zhang, Luna K. Qiu, Tin Yan Tsui, Jiahang Xu, Chong Luo
arXiv:2607. 21557v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Modern AI agents rely on elaborate inference harnesses such as Claude Code, Codex, and OpenClaw to drive multi-turn reasoning, tool use, and access to external systems.
By Xiao Yu, Baolin Peng, Ruize Xu, Hao Zou, Qianhui Wu, Hao Cheng, Wenlin Yao, Nikhil Singh, Zhou Yu, Jianfeng Gao
arXiv:2607. 12227v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We revisit the evaluation of automatic harness evolution for LLM agents.
By Yike Wang, Huaisheng Zhu, Zhengyu Hu, Yige Yuan, Zhengyu Chen, Shakti Senthil, Hannaneh Hajishirzi, Yulia Tsvetkov, Pradeep Dasigi, Teng Xiao
LEGO-RL is a framework that connects native coding-agent harnesses with scalable policy‑gradient training without altering the harnesses’ internal flow. It achieves faithful optimization through in‑process LLM proxying, reliable execution via sandbox orchestration, and observable training with automated validation and a Live UI. Experiments show LEGO‑RL improves the Qwen3.5‑35B‑A3B model’s performance on three native harnesses while preserving high rollout‑training probability correlation.
By Yiming Du, Yuxin Jiang, Tao Yuan, Jianbo Dai, Shaowei Wang, Jierun Chen, Chaofan Tao, Xianzhi Yu, Lifeng Shang, Kam-Fai Wong, Xiaohui Li, Haoli Bai