arXiv Machine Learning

JIT-Agent: Scaling Harness Intelligence via Just-in-Time Harness Evolution

JIT‑Agent is a model that automatically generates task‑adaptive agent harnesses for any off‑the‑shelf LLM, replacing manual, task‑specific harness design. It learns to compose, repair, and evolve harnesses using a fixed four‑module protocol, and its use boosts performance on benchmarks such as DeepSearchQA and OdysseyBench, outperforming several mature agent runtimes. The approach demonstrates that harness intelligence can be trained, transferred, and compounded independently of model scaling.

arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 2

HarnessDev: Can LLMs Create and Evolve Their Own Agent Harness?

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 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 Computation and Language
Sep 7

EVOHARNESSBENCH: Can Your Agents Keep Pace with an Evolving Harness?

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 Computation and Language
1d ago

EvoHarnessBench: Can Your Agents Keep Pace with an Evolving Harness?

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 AI
Aug 7

HarnessOpt-Bench: Evaluating LLMs at Harness Optimization

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 AI
Jun 2

Adaptive Auto-Harness: Sustained Self-Improvement for Agentic System Deployment on Open-Ended Task Streams

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
arXiv AI
Aug 19

Agent Lightning v1.0: Towards Harnessed Agentic RL

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 AI
Aug 19

LEGO-RL: Harness-Native Reinforcement Learning for Coding Agents

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