The paper introduces a task-aware harness provisioning method for large language model agents used in mission‑critical infrastructure operations. By mapping each task to an optimal harness configuration—determined through mathematical task classification and empirical agent execution data—the authors propose a map‑guided escalation algorithm that starts with a minimal harness and expands only when necessary. Experiments on liquid‑cooling and power‑grid tasks show that this approach can improve accuracy and reduce token usage compared to full harness provisioning, revealing a domain‑dependent accuracy‑cost trade‑off.
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.
arXiv:2606. 21140v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Rapid advances in large language models have improved the task-solving capabilities of command-line-interface (CLI)-based agents, whose CLIs determine how models invoke tools, maintain interaction history, and recover from failures.
Harness-Bench is a diagnostic benchmark that evaluates how different harness configurations affect LLM agent performance in realistic workflows. It tests 106 sandboxed offline tasks across multiple model backends, recording artifacts, execution traces, and usage statistics to analyze completion, process quality, efficiency, and failure behavior. The study finds significant variation in outcomes across model-harness pairings, indicating that agent capability should be reported at the configuration level rather than solely by the base model.
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.
UniACE is a unified framework that standardizes the evaluation of large language model (LLM) agents by representing each benchmark as an instruction–tool–environment triplet and running models through a shared, task‑agnostic harness in isolated runtimes. It preserves native success criteria, offers an offline mode for dynamic‑resource tasks, and standardizes efficiency metrics, execution records, and failure attribution. Applying UniACE to 7 benchmarks across 24 domains and 15 models revealed significant score shifts, ranking reversals, and sensitivity to evidence representation, highlighting the impact of evaluation configuration on reported agent performance.
arXiv:2608. 00107v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Agentic systems must repeatedly decide whether to answer directly, decompose a task, invoke a tool, execute code, delegate to a specialist, verify an intermediate result, or recover from failure.
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...
The paper introduces A-LEMS, a framework that measures AI energy consumption at the goal level rather than per model invocation, defining Energy per Successful Goal (EpG) as total workflow energy divided by successfully completed goals. It also proposes the Orchestration Overhead Index (OOI) to quantify the extra energy cost of agentic systems compared to linear execution, revealing significant overheads across various hardware platforms and task families. The study demonstrates that traditional per-inference metrics underestimate the true energy cost of completing user goals in agentic AI workflows.
arXiv:2610.26770v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Harness development plays a crucial role in building capable AI agents. Recent approaches improve harnesses through recursive self-improvement (RSI...
arXiv:2607. 10059v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Agent systems based on large language models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed for autonomous tasks, yet existing evaluations mostly focus on task success rather than whether agents know when to abstain.
arXiv:2609.14857v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Recent work extends recursive self-improvement (RSI) to agent harnesses for long-horizon coding and terminal tasks, enabling agents to improve executio...
arXiv:2605. 27898v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: As LLMs are increasingly deployed as agents, reliable assessment of their agentic capabilities has become essential.