HarnessX: A Composable, Adaptive, and Evolvable Agent Harness Foundry
- URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2606.14249v1
- Date: Fri, 12 Jun 2026 08:27:11 GMT
- Title: HarnessX: A Composable, Adaptive, and Evolvable Agent Harness Foundry
- Abstract summary: HarnessX is a foundry for composable, adaptive, and evolvable agent harnesses.<n>It assembles typed harness primitives via a substitution algebra, adapts them through AEGIS.<n>It closes the harness-model loop by turning trajectories into both harness updates and model training signal.
- Score: 35.87794858139959
- License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
- Abstract: AI agent performance depends critically on the runtime harness, comprising the prompts, tools, memory, and control flow that mediate how a model observes, reasons, and acts. Yet today's harnesses remain largely hand-crafted and static: each new model or task still demands bespoke scaffolding, and the rich traces produced during execution are rarely distilled back into systematic improvement. We introduce HarnessX, a foundry for composable, adaptive, and evolvable agent harnesses. HarnessX assembles typed harness primitives via a substitution algebra, adapts them through AEGIS, a trace-driven multi-agent evolution engine grounded in an operational mirror between symbolic adaptation and reinforcement learning, and closes the harness-model loop by turning trajectories into both harness updates and model training signal. Across five benchmarks (ALFWorld, GAIA, WebShop, tau^3-Bench, and SWE-bench Verified), HarnessX yields an average gain of +14.5% (up to +44.0%), with gains largest where baselines are lowest. These results suggest that agent progress need not come from model scaling alone: composing and evolving runtime interfaces from execution feedback is an actionable and complementary lever. The complete codebase will be open-sourced in a future release.
Related papers
- Co-Evolving Harnesses and Models: On-Policy Correction Helps Weaker Models Catch Up Where Imitation Fails [23.287109132562403]
Automated harness evolution can enable smaller models to perform well on domain-specific tasks at a fraction of frontier-model cost.<n>We show that imitation transfers knowledge and increases scaffold usage, but disrupts model-harness fit.<n>We develop an on-policy expert-correction pipeline, automated by a meta-level MLE agent, that localizes the failing turn in the weaker model's own rollout and asks the expert to rewrite only that turn.
arXiv Detail & Related papers (2026-09-08T17:53:49Z) - HarnessDev: Can LLMs Create and Evolve Their Own Agent Harness? [61.02699867449589]
We introduce HarnessDev, a benchmark that shifts the unit of evaluation from task outputs to run infrastructure.<n>In Creation, the agent starts from a minimal seed and a small number of cases, then builds a complete execution system.<n>In Evolution, it starts from its own created harness and iteratively revises it using downstream execution feedback, with the goal of improving benchmark performance.
arXiv Detail & Related papers (2026-09-01T15:45:33Z) - JIT-Agent: Scaling Harness Intelligence via Just-in-Time Harness Evolution [74.58840188662151]
JIT-Agent is a harness intelligence model trained to synthesize task-adaptive agent harnesses on the fly.<n>JIT-Agent is the first model purpose-built for just-in-time harness generation.
arXiv Detail & Related papers (2026-08-26T10:05:33Z) - HELIX: Model-Harness Co-evolution for Recursive Self-Improvement [8.484282837156933]
We present HELIX, a source-traceable substrate for harness evolution.<n>We show how harness evolution expands current capability and creates learning signal for the next model.
arXiv Detail & Related papers (2026-08-14T04:44:53Z) - EvolveNet: Collaborative Harness Evolution for Agent Self-Improvement [70.68218215070745]
Existing approaches assume that all execution experience can be routed to a single harness.<n>We introduce EvolveNet, a paradigm of harness evolution that moves experience extraction to the data.
arXiv Detail & Related papers (2026-08-05T15:37:18Z) - Adaptive Auto-Harness: Sustained Self-Improvement for Agentic System Deployment on Open-Ended Task Streams [41.672123164003814]
We introduce Adaptive Auto-Harness, a framework and system for such streams.<n>It decomposes the gap to an oracle harness into evolution loss and adaptation loss.<n>It outperforms five existing auto-harness baselines across prediction-market, security-competition, and event-forecasting streams.
arXiv Detail & Related papers (2026-06-01T06:51:14Z) - Harness Updating Is Not Harness Benefit: Disentangling Evolution Capabilities in Self-Evolving LLM Agents [82.27610290890475]
We analyze two harness self-evolution capabilities: (i) harness-updating, the capability to produce useful persistent harness updates from execution evidence; (ii) harness-benefit, the capability to benefit from updated harnesses during task solving.<n>Our analysis reveals two findings. First, harness-updating is flat in base capability: models from different capability tiers produce harness updates that lead to surprisingly similar gains.<n>Second, harness-benefit is non-monotonic in base capability: weak-tier models benefit little from updated harnesses, mid-tier models benefit most, and strong-tier models benefit less than mid-tier.
arXiv Detail & Related papers (2026-05-28T22:16:14Z) - Adapting the Interface, Not the Model: Runtime Harness Adaptation for Deterministic LLM Agents [4.765206163164323]
We propose Life-Harness, a lifecycle-aware runtime harness that improves frozen LLM agents without changing model weights or evaluation environments.<n>Life-Harness evolves from training trajectories by converting recurring interaction failures into reusable interventions across environment contracts, procedural skills, action realization, and trajectory regulation.<n>Life-Harness improves 116 out of 126 model--environment settings across 18 model backbones, with an average relative improvement of 88.5%.
arXiv Detail & Related papers (2026-05-21T08:36:49Z) - Agentic Harness Engineering: Observability-Driven Automatic Evolution of Coding-Agent Harnesses [57.20181537213498]
Agentic Harness Engineering (AHE) is a closed loop that automates harness engineering.<n>AHE addresses challenges through three matched observability pillars.<n>Ten AHE lift pass@1 on Terminal-Bench 2 from 69.7% to 77.0%, surpassing the human-designed harness Codex-CLI.<n>On SWE-bench-verified it tops aggregate success at 12% fewer tokens than the seed, and on Terminal-Bench 2 it yields +5.1 to +10.1pp cross-family gains.
arXiv Detail & Related papers (2026-04-28T16:55:02Z) - xLAM: A Family of Large Action Models to Empower AI Agent Systems [111.5719694445345]
We release xLAM, a series of large action models designed for AI agent tasks.
xLAM consistently delivers exceptional performance across multiple agent ability benchmarks.
arXiv Detail & Related papers (2024-09-05T03:22:22Z)
This list is automatically generated from the titles and abstracts of the papers in this site.
This site does not guarantee the quality of this site (including all information) and is not responsible for any consequences.