OpenForgeRL: Train Harness-native Agents in Any Environment
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Abstract (arXiv)
Modern AI agents rely on elaborate inference harnesses such as Claude Code, Codex, and OpenClaw to drive multi-turn reasoning, tool use, and access to external systems. While powerful, these complex harnesses also make agents hard to train end-to-end with open infrastructure, whose SFT/RL stacks cannot natively express stateful, multi-process harness inference. To address this, we present OpenForgeRL, an open-source framework for training harness-based agents end-to-end in diverse environments. OpenForgeRL achieves this with a lightweight proxy that serves the harness's model calls while recording them as training data for a standard RL codebase (e.g., veRL), and a Kubernetes orchestrator that runs each rollout in its own remote container, together enabling training on any harness in any environment at scale. By decoupling training and inference, OpenForgeRL allows researchers to easily train, study, and improve agents directly in the real harnesses and environments they are deployed with. We validate our framework across diverse, complex harnesses and environments, spanning tool/claw-based agents and multimodal GUI browser- and computer-use agents. Using only hundreds to a few thousand tasks, OpenForgeClaw reaches 31.7 pass^3 and 55.9 pass@3 on ClawEval and 33.7 on QwenClawBench. OpenForgeGUI reaches 37.7 on OSWorld-Verified, 63.0 on Online-Mind2Web, and 72.3 on WebVoyager. Both outperform open baselines of similar size on nearly all benchmarks, and in the GUI setting match or surpass models several times larger. Beyond benchmarks, we analyze how harness choice (e.g., ZeroClaw, OpenClaw, Codex) and RL shape agent behavior. We find that some harnesses are substantially harder to learn than others, and that RL improves agentic reliability, such as self-verification, tool coverage, and completing multi-step plans, though critical abilities such as error recovery remain weak.
Key facts. Cited by 7 papers in the map (data through 7 Oct 2026). Builds on 30 of its 53 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 23 Jul 2026.
Builds on
30 of 53 references.
References · 30
- 2024DeepSeekMath: Pushing the Limits of Mathematical Reasoning in Open Language Modelscited by 8,851
- 2025DeepSeek-R1: Incentivizing Reasoning Capability in LLMs via Reinforcement Learningcited by 6,146
- 2023Efficient Memory Management for Large Language Model Serving with PagedAttentioncited by 5,767
- 2023SWE-bench: Can Language Models Resolve Real-World GitHub Issues?cited by 3,193
- 2023Voyager: An Open-Ended Embodied Agent with Large Language Modelscited by 2,081
- 2024HybridFlow: A Flexible and Efficient RLHF Frameworkcited by 1,980
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- 2024SWE-agent: Agent-Computer Interfaces Enable Automated Software Engineeringcited by 1,628
- 2025Search-R1: Training LLMs to Reason and Leverage Search Engines with Reinforcement Learningcited by 1,371
- 2025Qwen3 Embedding: Advancing Text Embedding and Reranking Through Foundation Modelscited by 1,175
- 2023CogAgent: A Visual Language Model for GUI Agentscited by 692
- 2024Executable Code Actions Elicit Better LLM Agentscited by 537
18 more
- 2025Group-in-Group Policy Optimization for LLM Agent Trainingcited by 442
- 2024WebVoyager: Building an End-to-End Web Agent with Large Multimodal Modelscited by 424
- 2025AReaL: A Large-Scale Asynchronous Reinforcement Learning System for Language Reasoningcited by 234
- 2024Agent S: An Open Agentic Framework that Uses Computers Like a Humancited by 182
- 2025An Illusion of Progress? Assessing the Current State of Web Agentscited by 165
- 2024AgentTrek: Agent Trajectory Synthesis via Guiding Replay with Web Tutorialscited by 123
- 2026OpenClaw-RL: Train Any Agent Simply by Talkingcited by 83
- 2026Claw-Eval: Towards Trustworthy Evaluation of Autonomous Agentscited by 57
- 2024Proposer-Agent-Evaluator(PAE): Autonomous Skill Discovery For Foundation Model Internet Agentscited by 50
- 2025AgentSynth: Scalable Task Generation for Generalist Computer-Use Agentscited by 41
- 2025Fara-7B: An Efficient Agentic Model for Computer Usecited by 34
- 2026SWE-rebench V2: Language-Agnostic SWE Task Collection at Scalecited by 24
- 2026WebGym: Scaling Training Environments for Visual Web Agents with Realistic Taskscited by 19
- 2026Polar: Agentic RL on Any Harness at Scalecited by 12
- 2025Dyna-Mind: Learning to Simulate from Experience for Better AI Agentscited by 7
- 2026Orchard: An Open-Source Agentic Modeling Frameworkcited by 7
- 2026OpenWebRL: Demystifying Online Multi-turn Reinforcement Learning for Visual Web Agentscited by 6
- 2026Synthetic Computers at Scale for Long-Horizon Productivity Simulationcited by 1
Built on by
Citing papers per year: 2026: 7.
7 papers.
- 2026LEGO-RL: Harness-Native Reinforcement Learning for Coding Agentscited by 3
- 2026ClawGym II: Exploring Black-Box RL on Agent Harnesscited by 2
- 2026Ecdysis: Efficient and Effective Training of Runtime Harnesses for LLM Agentscited by 2
- 2026What Does Multi-Harness RL Learn? Credit Assignment and Portability in Coding Agentscited by 1
- 2026SCLATE: a Substrate for Continual-Learning Agent Training and Evaluationcited by 0
- 2026SCOUT: Synergizing Reasoning and Tool-Use for Computer-Use Safetycited by 0
- 2026VISTA: A Visual Harness for Reasoning in an Interactive Worldcited by 0
- 2026VISTA: A Visual Harness for Reasoning in an Interactive World1 Oct 2026
- 2026SCOUT: Synergizing Reasoning and Tool-Use for Computer-Use Safety28 Sep 2026
- 2026SCLATE: a Substrate for Continual-Learning Agent Training and Evaluation26 Sep 2026
- 2026Ecdysis: Efficient and Effective Training of Runtime Harnesses for LLM Agents10 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
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