mlsanityData to 7 Oct 2026

Adaptive Auto-Harness: Sustained Self-Improvement for Agentic System Deployment on Open-Ended Task Streams

arXiv 2606.01770 ↗First posted 1 Jun 2026cs.LG cs.AIcited by 20

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

also in 1 more
Abstract (arXiv)

Auto-harness systems such as A-Evolve, GEPA, and Meta-Harness improve LLM agents by optimizing prompts, skills, tools, memories, and supporting infrastructure from execution feedback, but they are typically evaluated on fixed offline benchmarks. Real deployments instead present open-ended task streams: histories grow without a fixed endpoint, heterogeneous tasks require different harnesses, and problem distributions shift over time. These challenges make a single repeatedly and densely updated harness brittle, causing performance degradation as accuracy peaks early and then declines. This motivates sustained harness construction with task-wise adaptation. We introduce Adaptive Auto-Harness, a framework and system for such streams. The framework decomposes the gap to an oracle harness into evolution loss and adaptation loss. The system addresses these losses with a stateful multi-agent evolver, a harness tree with solve-time routing, and human-steering hooks for cases where history lacks the needed signal. Across prediction-market, security-competition, and event-forecasting streams, Adaptive Auto-Harness outperforms five existing auto-harness baselines and ablations attribute gains to better construction, routing, or targeted human steering. Code is available in hrefhttps://github.com/A-EVO-Lab/a-evolve/tree/release/adaptive-auto-harnessLink.

Key facts. Cited by 20 papers in the map (data through 7 Oct 2026). Placed in Software engineering coding agents, one of 16 directions in LLM agents and tool use. Builds on 13 of its 18 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 1 Jun 2026.

Builds on

13 of 18 references.

Closest ancestors · 1

Same direction, newest first

  1. 2026Continual Harness: Online Adaptation for Self-Improving Foundation Agents11 May

Other references · 12

  1. 2017Outrageously Large Neural Networks: The Sparsely-Gated Mixture-of-Experts Layercited by 3,413
  2. 2023SWE-bench: Can Language Models Resolve Real-World GitHub Issues?cited by 3,193
  3. 2015Domain-Adversarial Training of Neural Networkscited by 3,023
  4. 2021Learning to Prompt for Continual Learningcited by 938
  5. 2020Dark Experience for General Continual Learning: a Strong, Simple Baselinecited by 895
  6. 2020Do We Really Need to Access the Source Data? Source Hypothesis Transfer for Unsupervised Domain Adaptationcited by 844
  7. 2022DualPrompt: Complementary Prompting for Rehearsal-free Continual Learningcited by 635
  8. 2026Meta-Harness: End-to-End Optimization of Model Harnessescited by 248
  9. 2025FutureX: An Advanced Live Benchmark for LLM Agents in Future Predictioncited by 55
  10. 2025Training Language Model Agents to Find Vulnerabilities with CTF-Dojocited by 15
  11. 2026PolyBench: Benchmarking LLM Forecasting and Trading Capabilities on Live Prediction Market Datacited by 11
  12. 2025Reinforcement Learning for Individual Optimal Policy from Heterogeneous Datacited by 3

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Cited by year (2026 to 7 Oct)

Citing papers per year: 2026: 20.

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  1. 2026Recursive Harness Self-Improvementcited by 22
  2. 2026Evo-Harness: Context-to-Harness Skill Compilation for Self-Evolving Agentscited by 12
  3. 2026JIT-Agent: Scaling Harness Intelligence via Just-in-Time Harness Evolutioncited by 10
  4. 2026Verify Smarter, Evolve Further: Efficient Harness Evolution through Behavior-Aware Verificationcited by 7
  5. 2026AutoDesign: Meta-Harness Optimization for Long-Horizon Agentic Designcited by 5
  6. 2026Hierarchical Self-Improvement: A Framework for Task-Specific Evolvable Agent Harnessescited by 4
  7. 2026RRSI: Regularized Recursive Self-Improvement of Agent Harnessescited by 3
  8. 2026Harness Continual Learning: Continual Adaptation Beyond Model Parameterscited by 2
  9. 2026Graph Engineering in the Era of LLM Agents: From Individual Intelligence to System Intelligencecited by 1
  10. 2026Agents in the Large: Perception-Centered Architecture for Persistent Agentscited by 1
  11. 2026Belief-Calibrated Optimization: An Explicit World Model for Agentic Optimizationcited by 1
  12. 2026RobustSGPO: Search-Space Control for Agent Harness Evolutioncited by 1
8 more
  1. 2026HM-ROUTER: Joint Model and Harness Routing for Agentic Systemscited by 0
  2. 2026RLHarness: Co-evolving Procedural Skills with Reinforcement Learning for Long-horizon Multimodal Reasoningcited by 0
  3. 2026PluginRSI: Recursive Improvement of Agent Harnesses with Reusable Pluginscited by 0
  4. 2026Harness Evolution as Learning: Approximation, Generalization, and Optimization Limits of Self-Improving Personal Agentscited by 0
  5. 2026Self-Evolving Harness on Multiple Tasks with the Agent as Its Own Optimizercited by 0
  6. 2026Adaptive-GEPA: Make Your Harness Fit Heterogeneous Requestscited by 0
  7. 2026Learning from Research: Toward Lifelong Agent Harness Evolutioncited by 0
  8. 2026ReLiveGym: Evaluating Long-Lived Agents over Weeks of Replayed Realitycited by 0

Similar, not cited

Close in wording, no citation either way

  1. 2026HarnessForge: Joint Harness and Policy Evolution for Adaptive Agent Systems
  2. 2026Rethinking the Evaluation of Harness Evolution for Agents
  3. 2026AutoSaddler: Automatic Harness Optimization with Durable Updates from Agent Execution Traces
  4. 2026EvoHarnessBench: Can Your Agents Keep Pace with an Evolving Harness?
  5. 2026Adapting the Interface, Not the Model: Runtime Harness Adaptation for Deterministic LLM Agents
  6. 2026EvoHarness-RL: Learning Self-Evolving Runtime Harness for Long-Horizon LLM Agents
  7. 2026ModularRSI: Modular and Generalizable Recursive Harness Self-Improvement
  8. 2026SEAGym: An Evaluation Environment for Self-Evolving LLM Agents