arXiv AI
Oct 9

The Harness as the Only Mutable Surface: Compliance-Bounded Self-Evolution of LLM Agents in Credit Pipelines, with a Measured Admission Gate

The paper proposes that self‑evolving large‑language‑model agents can only be safely reviewed if their changes are confined to the runtime harness—instruction text, tool‑call logic, and primitive composition—while the model weights remain fixed. A dual‑loop engine with an admission gate records a hash‑chained diff before deployment, and simulation experiments show that this gate admits only safe changes, preventing error increases and maintaining false‑positive rates. When the gate is removed, many harmful changes slip through and missed flags rise, illustrating the gate’s protective role.

By Ravil Akhtyamov
arXiv AI
Sep 23

Self-Healing Harness for Runtime Oversight of Agent Self-Modification

The paper introduces a self‑healing harness that enforces admission control over language‑model agents’ self‑modifications. The harness runs a Detect‑Notice‑Heal‑Validate loop, allowing agents to propose rule changes that are only granted persistent authority after demonstrating improvement on a failure case without regressing on protected cases. Across 16 benchmark runs, the harness rejected many locally beneficial proposals that caused collateral regressions, while improving task‑completion scores and reliability.

By Sina Tayebati, Divake Kumar, Nastaran Darabi, Ranganath Krishnan, Amit Ranjan Trivedi
arXiv AI
Sep 3

LLM-as-a-Judge Is Not an Oracle: Why Self-Improving Agents Need Deterministic Guardrails

The paper argues that using a large language model (LLM) as the sole judge in self‑improving agent pipelines is problematic, as the judge can be biased or manipulated, leading to false confidence in system performance. The authors propose a new framework, PROCTOR, which replaces the oracle judge with a deterministic, teacher‑student loop that enforces guardrails such as sandboxing, role separation, and acceptance checks to prevent cheating and ensure reliable evaluation. Experiments across contract analysis, compliance review, and code quality demonstrate that PROCTOR mitigates eleven identified failure modes that previously allowed agents to achieve perfect scores while hiding significant capability gaps.

By Vansh Wahi
arXiv Machine Learning
Jul 10

TTHE: Test-Time Harness Evolution

arXiv:2607. 08124v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The behavior of an LLM agent is determined not only by the underlying model, but also by its harness: the executable program that constructs context, invokes tools, verifies intermediate results, and recovers from failures.

By Jun Nie, Yonggang Zhang, Jun Song, Qianshu Cai, Dahai Yu, Yike Guo, Xinmei Tian, Bo Han