HarnessX: A Composable, Adaptive, and Evolvable Agent Harness Foundry

Hugging Face Daily Papers Papers

Summary

HarnessX is a foundry for composable, adaptive, and evolvable AI agent harnesses that uses compositional primitives and trace-driven evolution to improve agent performance. Across five benchmarks, it achieves an average gain of +14.5% (up to +44.0%), demonstrating that runtime interface evolution is a complementary lever to model scaling.

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.
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Abstract

HarnessX enables adaptive and evolvable AI agent runtime interfaces through compositional primitives, trace-driven evolution, and feedback loops that improve both harness design and model training.

AIagent performancedepends critically on theruntime harness, comprising theprompts,tools,memory, andcontrol flowthat 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 asubstitution algebra, adapts them throughAEGIS, a trace-drivenmulti-agent evolution enginegrounded in anoperational mirrorbetweensymbolic adaptationandreinforcement learning, and closes theharness-model loopby 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 fromexecution feedbackis an actionable and complementary lever. The complete codebase will be open-sourced in a future release.

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