ClawGym II: Exploring Black-Box RL on Agent Harness
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Abstract (arXiv)
Agent harnesses have substantially improved performance on long-horizon tasks by coordinating agent interactions with the environment. However, reinforcement learning through complex harnesses remains largely unexplored, as scaling such training to long-horizon agent tasks introduces fundamental challenges. In this work, we present a unified black-box RL framework for stable and scalable optimization of general agents through complex harnesses. Concretely, we first build a sandbox-based execution infrastructure that isolates task environments and harnesses within temporary sandboxes for large-scale concurrent rollouts. We then decouple policy optimization from opaque harness execution and place a serving proxy at the model boundary to capture model calls. To reconstruct multi-turn trajectories and improve training efficiency, we organize the captured calls into prefix trees and further adapt both critic-based PPO and critic-free GRPO to optimize over the recovered tree structure. Meanwhile, we maintain training-inference consistency throughout the optimization process. Finally, we introduce mix-harness training, allowing a single model to be jointly optimized by heterogeneous harnesses. With Qwen3-30A3B, black-box RL improves Pass@1 on ClawGym-Bench by 9.98 and 14.81 points through OpenClaw and Claude Code, respectively, while remaining stable over 200-400 optimization steps. Moreover, the framework yields consistent gains on more challenging tasks such as JobBench and OfficeQA. Overall, our framework enables effective, stable, and scalable optimization of general agents through black-box harnesses, supporting unified training across heterogeneous execution systems.
Key facts. Cited by 2 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026). Builds on 19 of its 34 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 17 Aug 2026.
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19 of 34 references.
References · 19
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- 2026SWE-World: Building Software Engineering Agents in Docker-Free Environmentscited by 25
7 more
- 2025Towards Effective Code-Integrated Reasoningcited by 23
- 2026SWE-Master: Unleashing the Potential of Software Engineering Agents via Post-Trainingcited by 22
- 2026ClawGym: A Scalable Framework for Building Effective Claw Agentscited by 15
- 2026Polar: Agentic RL on Any Harness at Scalecited by 14
- 2026Harness Handbook: Making Evolving Agent Harnesses Readable,Navigable, and Editablecited by 13
- 2026KAT-Coder-V2 Technical Reportcited by 8
- 2026OpenForgeRL: Train Harness-native Agents in Any Environmentcited by 7
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Citing papers per year: 2026: 2.
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