HarnessBridge: Learnable Bidirectional Controller for LLM Agent Harness
On the map: LLM agents and tool use → Software engineering coding agents
Abstract (arXiv)
Large language models are increasingly deployed as agents for long-horizon tasks, yet their performance is shaped not only by model capability and environment design, but also by the harness that mediates agent--environment interaction. Existing harnesses are largely manually engineered, making them difficult to scale as trajectories grow longer and interactions become more complex. In this work, we ask whether harness can be generated by a learnable plug-in module that can be trained in an end-to-end fashion. We introduce HarnessBridge, a lightweight learnable harness controller that parameterizes the agent--environment interface as a bidirectional projection. HarnessBridge learns two bidirectional projections: observation projection, which distills raw trajectories into compact, decision-relevant states, and action projection, which converts proposed actions into executable transitions or trajectory-grounded rejections. We train HarnessBridge on a harness supervision dataset via unified instruction tuning. On Terminal-Bench~2.0 and SWE-bench Verified, HarnessBridge matches or surpasses strong specialized harnesses while substantially reducing token usage and trajectory length, and generalizes from smaller generators to larger commercial models.
Key facts. Cited by 3 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026). Placed in Software engineering coding agents, one of 16 directions in LLM agents and tool use. Builds on 25 of its 36 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 11 Jun 2026.
Builds on
25 of 36 references.
Closest ancestors · 2
Same direction, newest first
- 2025SWE-smith: Scaling Data for Software Engineering Agents30 Apr
- 2024OpenHands: An Open Platform for AI Software Developers as Generalist Agents23 Jul
Other references · 23
- 2022ReAct: Synergizing Reasoning and Acting in Language Modelscited by 8,695
- 2023Toolformer: Language Models Can Teach Themselves to Use Toolscited by 4,182
- 2023SWE-bench: Can Language Models Resolve Real-World GitHub Issues?cited by 3,373
- 2023Voyager: An Open-Ended Embodied Agent with Large Language Modelscited by 2,191
- 2024τ-bench: A Benchmark for Tool-Agent-User Interaction in Real-World Domainscited by 1,402
- 2023SGLang: Efficient Execution of Structured Language Model Programscited by 1,141
- 2025τ2-Bench: Evaluating Conversational Agents in a Dual-Control Environmentcited by 627
- 2026Terminal-Bench: Benchmarking Agents on Hard, Realistic Tasks in Command Line Interfacescited by 585
- 2025R1-Searcher: Incentivizing the Search Capability in LLMs via Reinforcement Learningcited by 336
- 2026SkillsBench: Benchmarking How Well Agent Skills Work Across Diverse Taskscited by 315
- 2026Meta-Harness: End-to-End Optimization of Model Harnessescited by 309
- 2025Deep Research Agents: A Systematic Examination And Roadmapcited by 128
11 more
- 2025A Survey of WebAgents: Towards Next-Generation AI Agents for Web Automation with Large Foundation Modelscited by 87
- 2024AgentGen: Enhancing Planning Abilities for Large Language Model based Agent via Environment and Task Generationcited by 83
- 2025VAGEN: Reinforcing World Model Reasoning for Multi-Turn VLM Agentscited by 62
- 2026Natural-Language Agent Harnessescited by 61
- 2026A Survey of Agentic Reasoning for Large Language Models: Towards Recursively Self-Improving and Collective Agentscited by 50
- 2025A Survey of Reasoning and Agentic Systems in Time Series with Large Language Modelscited by 21
- 2026ARLArena: A Unified Framework for Stable Agentic Reinforcement Learningcited by 13
- 2026Why Do LLM-based Web Agents Fail? A Hierarchical Planning Perspectivecited by 9
- 2024Concept-Reversed Winograd Schema Challenge: Evaluating and Improving Robust Reasoning in Large Language Models via Abstractioncited by 4
- 2026KLong: Training LLM Agent for Extremely Long-horizon Taskscited by 4
- 2026T2PO: Uncertainty-Guided Exploration Control for Stable Multi-Turn Agentic Reinforcement Learningcited by 3
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Citing papers per year: 2026: 3.
3 papers.
Similar, not cited
Close in wording, no citation either way
- 2026Learning to Control LLM Agent Harnesses with Offline Reinforcement Learning
- 2026Adapting the Interface, Not the Model: Runtime Harness Adaptation for Deterministic LLM Agents
- 2026Harness-Zero: Harness Distillation via Agent-as-Harness
- 2026HarnessCompass: Guiding Automatic Harness Evolution toward Generalizable and Effective Agent Harnesses
- 2026EvoHarness-RL: Learning Self-Evolving Runtime Harness for Long-Horizon LLM Agents
- 2026HarnessBandit: Joint Learnability-Transferability Scheduling for Multi-Harness Agentic Reinforcement Learning
- 2026Agent Lightning v1.0: Towards Harnessed Agentic RL
- 2026Co-Harness: Co-Evolving Harnesses and Model Weights for LLM Agents