mlsanityData to 13 Oct 2026

ProofAgent Harness: Open Infrastructure for Adversarial Evaluation of AI Agents

arXiv 2605.24134 ↗First posted 22 May 2026cs.MAcited by 4

On the map: LLM agents and tool use → Software engineering coding agents

Abstract (arXiv)

AI agents are entering high-risk production settings, where they use tools, retain context, follow policies, handle private data, and interact with users over multiple turns. Yet many evaluation methods still judge isolated outputs or static tasks, missing failures that emerge through trajectory, pressure, and adversarial interaction. We introduce ProofAgent Harness, open infrastructure for scalable, auditable, and adversarial AI agent evaluation. The harness provides evaluation infrastructure around an agent: it curates evaluation intelligence, runs adversarial multi-turn trials, captures behavioral traces, applies post-hoc multi-juror scoring, resolves disagreement, and produces evidence-linked reports. Its open design allows developers and researchers to extend domains, traps, metrics, juror personas, scoring rules, and reporting formats. At its core is Adversarial Multi-Juror Scoring with Turn-Level Audit, which evaluates completed agent behavior under pressure using calibrated juror personas, consensus checks, and turn-level evidence. Experiments across customer support, medical triage, privacy and security, and code generation agents show that strong agents fail selectively through weak metrics, fragile turns, unsafe reframing, and manipulation paths. We also find that a small quantized local Harness LLM can challenge production agents powered by best-in-class large LLMs, suggesting that evaluation capability emerges from the full harness pipeline rather than model scale alone. ProofAgent Harness turns AI agent evaluation from a static score into scalable adversarial evaluation infrastructure: repeatable, evidence-backed, extensible, and actionable before deployment.

Key facts. Cited by 4 papers in the map (data through 13 Oct 2026). Placed in Software engineering coding agents, one of 16 directions in LLM agents and tool use. Builds on 16 of its 24 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 22 May 2026.

Builds on

16 of 24 references.

Closest ancestors · 1

Same direction, newest first

  1. 2023AutoGen: Enabling Next-Gen LLM Applications via Multi-Agent Conversation16 Aug

Other references · 15

  1. 2022ReAct: Synergizing Reasoning and Acting in Language Modelscited by 8,502
  2. 2023Judging LLM-as-a-Judge with MT-Bench and Chatbot Arenacited by 8,492
  3. 2023SWE-bench: Can Language Models Resolve Real-World GitHub Issues?cited by 3,274
  4. 2023Universal and Transferable Adversarial Attacks on Aligned Language Modelscited by 3,064
  5. 2023G-Eval: NLG Evaluation using GPT-4 with Better Human Alignmentcited by 2,228
  6. 2023WebArena: A Realistic Web Environment for Building Autonomous Agentscited by 1,953
  7. 2023ToolLLM: Facilitating Large Language Models to Master 16000+ Real-world APIscited by 1,904
  8. 2023Jailbroken: How Does LLM Safety Training Fail?cited by 1,637
  9. 2023AgentBench: Evaluating LLMs as Agentscited by 1,242
  10. 2022WebShop: Towards Scalable Real-World Web Interaction with Grounded Language Agentscited by 1,219
  11. 2022Red Teaming Language Models with Language Modelscited by 1,014
  12. 2022Red Teaming Language Models to Reduce Harms: Methods, Scaling Behaviors, and Lessons Learnedcited by 723
3 more
  1. 2025Agentic Systems: A Guide to Transforming Industries with Vertical AI Agentscited by 20
  2. 2026AI Agents Need Memory Control Over More Contextcited by 7
  3. 2025Physical AI Agents: Integrating Cognitive Intelligence with Real-World Actioncited by 5

Built on by

Cited by year (2026 to 13 Oct)

Citing papers per year: 2026: 4.

4 papers.

Similar, not cited

Close in wording, no citation either way

  1. 2026HarnessOpt-Bench: Evaluating LLMs at Harness Optimization
  2. 2026Phantom Guardrails: When Self-Improving Agent Harnesses Fix Failures That Never Happened
  3. 2026HarnessRisk: A Lifecycle-Oriented Benchmark for Agent Harness Safety
  4. 2026Harness Handbook: Making Evolving Agent Harnesses Readable,Navigable, and Editable
  5. 2025OpenAgentSafety: A Comprehensive Framework for Evaluating Real-World AI Agent Safety
  6. 2026ClayBuddy: A Framework, Evaluation, & Mitigation of Coding Agent Failures
  7. 2026BAITBENCH: Measuring Agent Reward Hacking with Optional Shortcuts Planted in ML Tasks
  8. 2026AgentAudit: An Open, Extensible Framework for Full-Lifecycle Trust Evaluation of AI Agents