arXiv AI
Verifier-Harness Co-Evolution for Training-Free Self-Improvement on Open-Ended Tasks
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DarwinX: Evolving Agent Harnesses Through Natural Selection
arXiv:2608. 07545v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: An LLM agent's capability depends not only on model weights but on its harness: prompts, tools, skills, and control flow.
arXiv AI
Aug 11
Hierarchical Self-Improvement: A Framework for Task-Specific Evolvable Agent Harnesses
arXiv:2608. 08466v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Modern LLM agents are often improved by modifying prompts, tools, or workflows manually, while the executable scaffold surrounding the model---the \emph{harness}---is typically treated as a fixed artifact after deployment.
arXiv AI
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Self-Evolving Harness on Multiple Tasks with the Agent as Its Own Optimizer
The paper introduces a self‑evolving harness framework where a frozen language‑model agent first solves tasks and then edits its own harness based on run records. Using a 49‑line seed harness, the evolved harness improves average scores on in‑distribution benchmarks by 4.48 points and on out‑of‑distribution benchmarks by 12.64 points, surpassing Codex on the former and matching it on the latter. Continued evolution on a specific out‑of‑distribution benchmark further raises performance, and the study analyzes emergent mechanisms such as output truncation and history compaction.
arXiv AI
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Who Verifies the Verifier? Co-Evolving Inspectable Graders with Self-Improving Agents
The paper introduces a method for co-evolving inspectable verifiers alongside self-improving agents. By synthesizing verifiers from clustered failures and selecting them based on agreement with a reference set, the authors demonstrate improved held‑out agreement on MBPP+ and outperform a bare LLM judge. They also show that removing anchor guards collapses the verifier into a vacuous grader, yet the collapsed verifier still trains skills effectively, indicating that downstream task scores cannot certify a self‑evolved verifier.
arXiv Computation and Language
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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...
arXiv Computation and Language
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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.