The performance bottleneck of agents is increasingly shifting from model capability to the robustness of their execution processes. Tools play a central role as the primary interface through which agents interact with external environments, yet existing methods rarely focus on ensuring robust tool use across diverse runtime conditions.
arXiv:2607. 14159v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: An agent harness is the external control layer that turns a base LLM into an executable agent by managing context, tools, orchestration, memory, decoding, and output handling.
By Yue Huang, Wenjie Wang, Han Bao, Yuchen Ma, Xiaonan Luo, Yi Nian, Haomin Zhuang, Zheyuan Liu, Yue Zhao, Xiangliang Zhang
Self-evolving agents can continually improve their behavior, while tools define the executable action space through which they interact with the environment. However, exposing the full tool library to...
arXiv:2602. 07883v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: LLM-powered agentic systems excel at complex long-horizon tasks, but remain constrained by static configurations fixed before execution.
By Jingqi Zhou, Sheng Wang, Dezhao Deng, Junwen Lu, Junwei Su, Qintong Li, Jiahui Gao, Hao Wu, Jiyue Jiang, Lingpeng Kong, Dunhong Jin, Chuan Wu
arXiv:2607. 01084v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: While Large Language Model (LLM) agents demonstrate proficiency in static benchmarks, their deployment in real-world scenarios is hindered by the dynamic nature of user queries, tool sets, and interaction dynamics.
By Song-Lin Lv, Weiming Wu, Rui Zhu, Zi-Jian Cheng, Lan-Zhe Guo
arXiv:2607. 11126v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large language model (LLM) agents increasingly rely on external tools served by shared providers and accessed by heterogeneous downstream agents.
By Yue Fang, Zhibang Yang, Fangkai Yang, Xiaoting Qin, Liqun Li, Qingwei Lin, Saravan Rajmohan, Dongmei Zhang
ToolCUA is an end‑to‑end agent that learns to optimally orchestrate GUI actions and tool calls for Computer Use Agents. It introduces a staged training pipeline that first scales interleaved GUI‑tool trajectories from static GUI data, then bootstraps decision making with single‑turn reinforcement learning, and finally refines performance via online agentic RL guided by a tool‑efficient path reward. On the OSWorld‑MCP benchmark, ToolCUA achieves 46.85% accuracy, a 66% relative improvement over the baseline and a 3.9% gain over GUI‑only models, setting a new state of the art for comparable‑scale models.
By Xuhao Hu, Xi Zhang, Haiyang Xu, Kyle Qiao, Jingyi Yang, Xuanjing Huang, Jing Shao, Ming Yan, Jieping Ye
The paper introduces KNOWS, a benchmark for evaluating web agents that act as assistants by retrieving, synthesizing, and presenting information across complex, multi-step browser tasks. It outlines a task design rubric, evaluation protocol combining deterministic checks with LLM judgments, and reports that current agents achieve only modest success, with the best performing agent succeeding on less than 3% of tasks. The study highlights significant gaps in agents’ tool use, visual understanding, and long‑horizon reasoning.
By Alexander Gill, Md Farhan Ishmam, Xuyen Nguyen, Neha Bhat, Parker Henry DeYoung, Fateme Hashemi Chaleshtori, Nathan Stringham, Kenneth Marino, Ana Marasovi\'c
arXiv:2609.33772v2 Announce Type: replace
Abstract: Executable environments are critical for post-training agents on tasks that require tool use and multi-step interaction, but constructing executabl...
By Weiyi Xu, Xiaowen Yang, Wen Da, Hang Xu, Canwei Li, Hongjie You, Pusen Dong, Yucheng Zeng, Zhaokai Luo, Mu Chuan
HarnessEvolve is a self‑evolving framework that improves agent harnesses—prompts, skills, tools, and execution logic—by learning from reference trajectories. It separates execution, evaluation, optimization, and gating into independent modules, addressing credit assignment failure, shortcut learning, and catastrophic forgetting. The approach uses reference trajectories to extract error signals, applies quality and performance gates to candidate updates, and validates updates on held‑out data, consistently outperforming state‑of‑the‑art baselines across diverse benchmarks.
By Wen Jiang, Mingmin Chu, Yimeng Tian, Qianxin Zhang, Haofei Yang, Rui Yang, Yang Liu, Tao Lv, Fangming Li
arXiv:2606. 15508v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Tool-augmented large language model agents increasingly operate over large tool libraries, but existing evaluations often focus on whether a model can call a tool correctly rather than how the visible tool menu shapes reliability, efficiency, and safety-relevant risk exposure.
By Rahul Suresh Babu, Laxmipriya Ganesh Iyer
arXiv:2609.36887v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Recent efforts to scale tool-use post-training have largely centered on the synthesis of executable environments, which constitute only one component o...
By Bo Mao, Hang He, Linting Wang, Lizhi Lin, Maosen Zhou, Guanming Liu, Jinxiu Liu, Tianyu Huai, Chaoyun Zhang, Bingxuan Li, Kepeng Lei, Guanting Dong, Zhou Shao, Rui Zheng, Hang Yan, Jie Zhou, Chengcheng Wan, Tao Gui, Liang He, Xipeng Qiu