Polar: Agentic RL on Any Harness at Scale
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Abstract (arXiv)
Reinforcement learning for language agents increasingly depends on custom harnesses that manage long-running context, multi-turn tool use and multi-agent orchestration. However, porting these harnesses into RL environment interfaces remains difficult and often loses important training signals. We bridge this gap with polar, a rollout framework for scalable asynchronous RL over arbitrary agent harnesses. Polar treats the agent harness as a black box: it proxies LLM API calls, records token-level model interactions, and reconstructs token-faithful trajectories for training. Each rollout node efficiently manages runtime prewarming, agent execution, trajectory reconstruction, and evaluation in parallel, exposing asynchronous service endpoints that can be consumed by independent trainers at scale. This decoupled design makes Polar agnostic to agent harnesses, training infrastructure, and RL algorithms while improving compute utilization for long-running agent workloads. We validate polar by training agents on software-engineering tasks with popular coding harnesses. Using simple GRPO, polar improves Qwen3.5-4B by 22.6, 4.8, 0.6 and 6.2 points on SWE-Bench Verified with the Codex, Claude Code, Qwen Code and Pi harnesses, respectively. We further demonstrate Polar for offline data generation over custom harnesses and ablate trajectory reconstruction strategies. Polar rewrites its preceding work, Prorl Agent, and has been registered as one of NeMo Gym environments.
Key facts. Cited by 14 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026). First posted on arXiv 22 May 2026.
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Citing papers per year: 2026: 14.
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- 2026Autonomous Research Agents: A Survey of AI Scientists and the Verification Gapcited by 9
- 2026OpenForgeRL: Train Harness-native Agents in Any Environmentcited by 7
- 2026From Chatbot to Digital Colleague: The Paradigm Shift Toward Persistent Autonomous AIcited by 6
- 2026Intern-S2-Preview: Scientific Agentic Foundation Modelcited by 4
- 2026LEGO-RL: Harness-Native Reinforcement Learning for Coding Agentscited by 4
- 2026FrogNano: Training a 4B Coding Agent via Online Task Synthesiscited by 4
- 2026ClawGym II: Exploring Black-Box RL on Agent Harnesscited by 2
- 2026What Does Multi-Harness RL Learn? Credit Assignment and Portability in Coding Agentscited by 2
- 2026HarnessBandit: Joint Learnability-Transferability Scheduling for Multi-Harness Agentic Reinforcement Learningcited by 1
- 2026Finding the Right Fit: Model-Harness Interactions across Agent Taskscited by 1
- 2026Molt: A Scalable PyTorch-Native Training Framework for Agentic Reinforcement Learningcited by 0
- 2026SCLATE: a Substrate for Continual-Learning Agent Training and Evaluationcited by 0
- 2026LoGRA: Scaling LLM Reinforcement Learning with Low-Rank Gradient Sketches5 Oct 2026
- 2026Finding the Right Fit: Model-Harness Interactions across Agent Tasks1 Oct 2026
- 2026QwenGyre: An Elastic Reinforcement Learning Framework for Training xLong-Horizon Agents27 Sep 2026
- 2026SCLATE: a Substrate for Continual-Learning Agent Training and Evaluation26 Sep 2026
- 2026HarnessBandit: Joint Learnability-Transferability Scheduling for Multi-Harness Agentic Reinforcement Learning12 Sep 2026
- 2026FrogNano: Training a 4B Coding Agent via Online Task Synthesis7 Sep 2026
- 2026What Does Multi-Harness RL Learn? Credit Assignment and Portability in Coding Agents3 Sep 2026
- 2026LEGO-RL: Harness-Native Reinforcement Learning for Coding Agents18 Aug 2026
- 2026ClawGym II: Exploring Black-Box RL on Agent Harness17 Aug 2026
- 2026Intern-S2-Preview: Scientific Agentic Foundation Model13 Aug 2026
- 2026OpenForgeRL: Train Harness-native Agents in Any Environment23 Jul 2026
- 2026Molt: A Scalable PyTorch-Native Training Framework for Agentic Reinforcement Learning22 Jul 2026
- 2026Autonomous Research Agents: A Survey of AI Scientists and the Verification Gapcited by 9
- 2026Intern-S2-Preview: Scientific Agentic Foundation Modelcited by 4
- 2026LEGO-RL: Harness-Native Reinforcement Learning for Coding Agentscited by 4
- 2026FrogNano: Training a 4B Coding Agent via Online Task Synthesiscited by 4
- 2026What Does Multi-Harness RL Learn? Credit Assignment and Portability in Coding Agentscited by 2
- 2026HarnessBandit: Joint Learnability-Transferability Scheduling for Multi-Harness Agentic Reinforcement Learningcited by 1
- 2026Finding the Right Fit: Model-Harness Interactions across Agent Taskscited by 1
- 2026Molt: A Scalable PyTorch-Native Training Framework for Agentic Reinforcement Learningcited by 0
- 2026QwenGyre: An Elastic Reinforcement Learning Framework for Training xLong-Horizon Agentscited by 0
- 2026Finding the Right Fit: Model-Harness Interactions across Agent Tasks1 Oct 2026
- 2026QwenGyre: An Elastic Reinforcement Learning Framework for Training xLong-Horizon Agents27 Sep 2026
- 2026HarnessBandit: Joint Learnability-Transferability Scheduling for Multi-Harness Agentic Reinforcement Learning12 Sep 2026
- 2026FrogNano: Training a 4B Coding Agent via Online Task Synthesis7 Sep 2026
- 2026What Does Multi-Harness RL Learn? Credit Assignment and Portability in Coding Agents3 Sep 2026
- 2026LEGO-RL: Harness-Native Reinforcement Learning for Coding Agents18 Aug 2026
- 2026Intern-S2-Preview: Scientific Agentic Foundation Model13 Aug 2026
- 2026Molt: A Scalable PyTorch-Native Training Framework for Agentic Reinforcement Learning22 Jul 2026
- 2026Autonomous Research Agents: A Survey of AI Scientists and the Verification Gap29 Jun 2026
- 2026OpenForgeRL: Train Harness-native Agents in Any Environmentcited by 7
- 2026From Chatbot to Digital Colleague: The Paradigm Shift Toward Persistent Autonomous AIcited by 6
- 2026ClawGym II: Exploring Black-Box RL on Agent Harnesscited by 2
- 2026SCLATE: a Substrate for Continual-Learning Agent Training and Evaluationcited by 0
- 2026LoGRA: Scaling LLM Reinforcement Learning with Low-Rank Gradient Sketchescited by 0
- 2026LoGRA: Scaling LLM Reinforcement Learning with Low-Rank Gradient Sketches5 Oct 2026
- 2026SCLATE: a Substrate for Continual-Learning Agent Training and Evaluation26 Sep 2026
- 2026ClawGym II: Exploring Black-Box RL on Agent Harness17 Aug 2026
- 2026OpenForgeRL: Train Harness-native Agents in Any Environment23 Jul 2026
- 2026From Chatbot to Digital Colleague: The Paradigm Shift Toward Persistent Autonomous AI12 Jun 2026