Living-Harness Is an Interactive-Agent Evolver
On the map: LLM agents and tool use → Software engineering coding agents
Abstract (arXiv)
Large language model (LLM) agents may recover from a failure within an episode or after a retry, yet the same execution failure can recur in later tasks because post-episode feedback rarely revises the persistent harness that guides future interactions. Static harnesses improve reliability through fixed tools, context, memory, and workflow structures, but remain unchanged after deployment. We propose Living-Harness, a self-evolving agent harness that converts each completed trajectory and its evaluator signals into posterior evidence for bounded harness updates. Guided by a domain-level Evolution-SOP (Standard Operating Procedure), Living-Harness extracts an episode abstraction and structured update evidence, and writes two complementary forms of procedural knowledge: episodic memory that records trigger conditions, failure patterns, and recovery actions, and a state graph that records state nodes, repair edges, and transition rules. The updated harness state is retrieved to guide future interactions, while tools and base context remain frozen, allowing procedural repairs to accumulate across evolution cycles. On eight interactive environments derived from τ2-Bench and MultiWOZ-2.4, Living-Harness improves average Pass@1 over the strongest interactive baseline by 10.07 and 9.91 percentage points, respectively, and supports retrieval-only reuse of the evolved harness state across model backbones. Our code will be made publicly available soon at https://github.com/anotherbricki/Living-Harness.
Key facts. Cited by 2 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 23 of its 37 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 29 Jul 2026.
Builds on
23 of 37 references.
References · 23
- 2022ReAct: Synergizing Reasoning and Acting in Language Modelscited by 8,355
- 2025Qwen3 Technical Reportcited by 8,195
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- 2025A Comprehensive Survey of Self-Evolving AI Agents: A New Paradigm Bridging Foundation Models and Lifelong Agentic Systemscited by 177
- 2026MemSkill: Learning and Evolving Memory Skills for Self-Evolving Agentscited by 129
11 more
- 2026SoK: Agentic Skills -- Beyond Tool Use in LLM Agentscited by 120
- 2026SKILL0: In-Context Agentic Reinforcement Learning for Skill Internalizationcited by 82
- 2026Agent Skills: A Data-Driven Analysis of Claude Skills for Extending Large Language Model Functionalitycited by 66
- 2026Agent-World: Scaling Real-World Environment Synthesis for Evolving General Agent Intelligencecited by 35
- 2025EvoTest: Evolutionary Test-Time Learning for Self-Improving Agentic Systemscited by 34
- 2026When Single-Agent with Skills Replace Multi-Agent Systems and When They Failcited by 34
- 2026SkillOrchestra: Learning to Route Agents via Skill Transfercited by 22
- 2026EvoTool: Self-Evolving Tool-Use Policy Optimization in LLM Agents via Blame-Aware Mutation and Diversity-Aware Selectioncited by 22
- 2025SOP-Agent: Empower General Purpose AI Agent with Domain-Specific SOPscited by 11
- 2026GenericAgent: A Token-Efficient Self-Evolving LLM Agent via Contextual Information Density Maximization (V1.0)cited by 10
- 2026From Procedural Skills to Strategy Genes: Towards Experience-Driven Test-Time Evolutioncited by 9
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Citing papers per year: 2026: 2.
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Similar, not cited
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- 2026Learning from Research: Toward Lifelong Agent Harness Evolution
- 2026Ecdysis: Efficient and Effective Training of Runtime Harnesses for LLM Agents
- 2026DemoEvolve: Overcoming Sparse Feedback in Agentic Harness Evolution with Demonstrations
- 2026Harness-R1: Learning to Edit Executable Runtime Harnesses from Agent Failure Trajectories
- 2026Adapting the Interface, Not the Model: Runtime Harness Adaptation for Deterministic LLM Agents
- 2026HarnessCompass: Guiding Automatic Harness Evolution toward Generalizable and Effective Agent Harnesses
- 2026Harness Updating Is Not Harness Benefit: Disentangling Evolution Capabilities in Self-Evolving LLM Agents
- 2026One Recipe, Many Harnesses: What Self-Evolution Encodes Across Languages and Models ↗