arXiv Computation and Language

Optimize the Harness, Not the Model: Fitting a Minimal Agent to a Self-Hostable LLM for Investigative Analysis

The paper introduces CLEO (Constrained Loop for Environment Optimization), a technique for tailoring a minimal agent harness around a self-hostable large language model (LLM) to meet the needs of government intelligence teams. CLEO selectively incorporates tools, guardrails, memory policies, and loop components that enhance accuracy while keeping the system general and auditable. On a held‑out dataset, the CLEO harness achieves an 83.8% pass rate—just 1.2 points below the top out‑of‑the‑box Claude Code SDK baseline—yet is two orders of magnitude smaller.

arXiv AI
Oct 5

Who Guards the Benchmarks? Automated Auditing of LLM Agent Benchmarks

The paper introduces BenchGuard, a framework that uses advanced language models to audit execution-based agent benchmarks. BenchGuard systematically cross-verifies benchmark artifacts through structured LLM protocols, optionally incorporating agent solutions or execution traces for deeper diagnostics. In tests on ScienceAgentBench and BIXBench Verified-50, BenchGuard uncovered numerous author-confirmed and expert-identified issues, including fatal errors that made tasks unsolvable, and demonstrated cost-effective auditing for complex bioinformatics tasks.

By Xinming Tu (Minta), Tianze Wang (Minta), Yingzhou (Minta), Lu, Kexin Huang, Yuanhao Qu, Sara Mostafavi
arXiv AI
Sep 7

Harbor Adapters and Harbor-Index: Infrastructure and a Curated Meta-Dataset for Large-Scale Agentic Evaluation

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.

By Lin Shi (Audrey), Haowei Lin (Audrey), Zixuan Zhu (Audrey), Xiaoyue Zhou (Audrey), Xiang Li (Audrey), Xiangning Lin (Audrey), Yaxuan Deng (Audrey), Han Xu (Audrey), Yuangang Li (Audrey), Shanda Li (Audrey), Zizhao Chen (Audrey), Hanwen Xing (Audrey), Harsh Raj (Audrey), Bo Chen (Audrey), Quan Shi (Audrey), Steven Dillmann (Audrey), Yipeng Gao (Audrey), Puneesh Khanna (Audrey), Ruofan Lu (Audrey), Chao Beyond Zhou (Audrey), Michael Yang (Audrey), Robert Zhang (Audrey), Siyuan Chai (Audrey), Jiayu Chang (Audrey), Yizhao Chen (Audrey), Xiaokun Chen (Audrey), Yiwei Dai (Audrey), Wenting Yang (Audrey), Hange Liu (Audrey), Minghao Liu (Audrey), Zihan Wang (Audrey), Adnan El Assadi (Audrey), Benedikt Stroebl (Audrey), E. Kelly Buchanan (Audrey), Han Meng (Audrey), Junwei He (Audrey), Longxuan Yu (Audrey), Radin Shayanfar (Audrey), Yukyung Lee (Audrey), Zhikang Dong (Audrey), Allen G Hart (Audrey), Anjiang Wei (Audrey), Anurag Kashyap (Audrey), Arpandeep Khatua (Audrey), Audrey Jixin Zheng (Audrey), Chengrui Ma (Audrey), David Heineman (Audrey), Dubing Chen (Audrey), Hai-Anh Trinh (Audrey), Haishuo Fang (Audrey), Hefan Zhang (Audrey), Hui Shen (Audrey), Issa Sugiura (Audrey), Jiankai Sun (Audrey), Jiechao Gao (Audrey), Junhong Lin (Audrey), Junnan Li (Audrey), Kai Yang (Audrey), Lei Hsiung (Audrey), Maoyu Wang (Audrey), Mengze Tang (Audrey), Nabil Omi (Audrey), Negin Raoof (Audrey), Nicholas Edwards (Audrey), Octavia Guo (Audrey), Orfeas Menis Mastromichalakis (Audrey), Pengliang Ji (Audrey), Przemys{\l}aw Hejman (Audrey), Qi Qi (Audrey), Qunshu Lin (Audrey), Richard Zhuang (Audrey), Rui Yang (Audrey), Ruichen Zheng (Audrey), Ryan Marten (Audrey), Shaghayegh Fazliani (Audrey), Shizheng Hou (Audrey), Sicong Jiang (Audrey), Sijie Li (Audrey), Song Bian (Audrey), Terry Yue Zhuo (Audrey), Tianqing Wu (Audrey), Tom Tang (Audrey), Wanjia Zhao (Audrey), Weihao Xuan (Audrey), Wenhua Liang (Audrey), Xian Liu (Audrey), Xin Lan (Audrey), Xuan Zhang (Audrey), Xuandong Zhao (Audrey), Yanchuan Tang (Audrey), Yifan Jiang (Audrey), Yijiang Li (Audrey), Yitong Guan (Audrey), Yizhi Li (Audrey), Yonghui Liu (Audrey), Yuheng Tang (Audrey), Yujun (Audrey), Mao, Yunfei Zhao, Yuxin Wang, Yuxuan Tang, Zhenheng Tang, Zhifei Li, Ziruo Wang, Ziyu She, Kaiyuan Liu, Iheb Chaabane, Yuxin Tang, Xiangyi Li, Andy Konwinski, Boxuan Li, Leon Liangyu Chen, Alex Dimakis, Nicholas Carlini, Soroush Vosoughi, Di He, Etash Guha, Benjamin Feuer, Mike Merrill, Ludwig Schmidt, Alex Shaw
arXiv AI
Sep 1

CrossAudit: A Git-Native, Cross-Vendor Audit Loop for Agentic Science

CrossAudit proposes a Git‑native, cross‑vendor audit protocol for autonomous research pipelines, ensuring each work increment is reviewed by an agent from a different vendor against a human‑written rulebook. Audit outcomes, disputes, and rulings are stored as git commits, providing a replayable, versioned supervision history. The authors implemented the protocol with GitHub Actions and Python, deployed it in a computational‑chemistry pipeline, and conducted a seeded‑defect trial that revealed differing interpretations of the same rulebook by two vendors.

By Zhaohe Dong, Yuhao Chen
arXiv AI
Oct 7

Cost-Aware Hierarchical Multi-Agent Ransomware Detection and Family Attribution under Analysis Budgets

The paper introduces a cost‑aware Hierarchical Multi‑Agent System (HMAS) for ransomware detection and family attribution that prioritizes static analysis and escalates to dynamic and memory analysis only when necessary, thereby reducing analysis time and resource usage. In experiments on 12,439 samples from 16 ransomware families, the deterministic HMAS achieved high F1 scores (0.93) while resolving nearly 58% of cases with static evidence alone and cutting average internal analysis cost by 44.6% compared to exhaustive methods. The system also records a complete provenance trace for each decision and includes optional local LLM review for limited verdict adjustment.

By Mubashar Iqbal, Asifullah Khan, Hifsa Asif, Saddam Hussain Khan, Umme Zahoora, Asifullah Khan
arXiv AI
Aug 10

An End-to-End Agent Auditing Engine

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.

By Haoning Wang, Mingxun Zhang, Chenyue Yu, Yingjun Shang, Xia Hu, Guanchu Wang, Na Zou
arXiv AI
Aug 11

$A^2E$ : An End-to-End Agent Auditing Engine

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.

By Haoning Wang, Mingxun Zhang, Chenyue Yu, Yingjun Shang, Xia Hu, Guanchu Wang, Na Zou
arXiv AI
Oct 27

Can Agentic Code Review Catch Vulnerabilities Before They Are Merged?

The paper introduces SecPRBench, a benchmark that evaluates large language model agents on real-world bug‑introducing commits from critical software systems such as Firefox, V8, and OpenSSL. It automates harvesting, building, and validating these commits, and uses an LLM‑as‑a‑judge to match findings with ground‑truth vulnerabilities. Across eight state‑of‑the‑art models, recall ranges from 32.5% to 78.1%, with Grok 4.6 and GPT‑6 sol performing best, while security‑focused harnesses like OpenAI’s Codex Security and Anthropic’s Defending Code influence recall differently.

By Yihan Yang, Chenyuan Yang, Zijie Zhao, Anh Nguyen Hoang, Ziqi Zhang, Weidong Wang, Zhiheng Lyu, Lingming Zhang
arXiv Computation and Language
Oct 26

SCI-AGENT-EXAM: Benchmarking Agents on Scientific Research Tasks

arXiv:2610.32441v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large language model (LLM) agents are increasingly capable of supporting scientific workflows, but their capabilities across diverse research activitie...

By Tianyun Zhong, Wei Wang, Jialin Li, Jianhong Tu, Liyao Li, Chuqiao Kuang, Tianshi Zheng, Songchi Zhou, Weiqi Zhai, Qile Jin, Jiajia Li, Jiasheng Zheng, Boxi Cao, Yaojie Lu, Hongyu Lin, Shiwei Ye, Bing Zhao, Hu Wei, Lin Qu, Xianpei Han
arXiv AI
Aug 13

The Next Challenge for Agentic Cybersecurity: A Realistic, Contamination-Free Reverse Engineering Benchmark

arXiv:2608. 11469v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: AI agents are rapidly improving in cybersecurity capabilities when the source code is available for analysis, yet much of the software most consequential to cybersecurity, including malware, firmware, and proprietary applications, is available only as binaries.

By Jeremy Spence, Nicholas Assaderaghi, Jinhao Zhu, Nikil Ravi, Raluca Ada Popa, Guannan Wei, Yangruibo Ding, Zhuo Zhang
arXiv AI
Oct 19

Explore Separately, Adopt Selectively: Execution-Guided Tool Use over Large Tool Libraries

The paper introduces BRIA (BRanch-Inspect-Adopt), an agent that isolates tool‑candidate investigations into separate branches, executing each candidate independently and then inspecting the execution evidence to adopt only useful results. BRIA dynamically retrieves additional tools as new needs arise during task execution and is evaluated on PlanBench‑XL and MCP‑Atlas with a library of 1,897 tools, outperforming or matching the strongest retrieval baselines. On MCP‑Atlas, BRIA achieves an average claim score of 89.77 versus 75.40 for MCP‑Zero, and it lies on the Pareto frontier for task performance and input‑token cost.

By Anna Mazhar, Seiji Maekawa, Nikita Bhutani