mlsanityData to 14 Oct 2026

HarnessBandit: Joint Learnability-Transferability Scheduling for Multi-Harness Agentic Reinforcement Learning

arXiv 2609.13739 ↗First posted 12 Sep 2026cs.LG cs.AI cs.CLcited by 1

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

Abstract (arXiv)

Language-model agents are increasingly deployed through diverse harnesses that differ in system prompts, tool schemas, control loops, and trajectory formats. The same model can perform unevenly across these interfaces, making robustness to harness variation an important objective. A natural approach is to train a shared policy through multiple harnesses, but doing so introduces a scheduling problem: each training step should favor a harness that currently provides a useful learning signal while also producing an update that benefits the other harnesses. We develop HarnessBandit, an online scheduler that selects one harness per optimizer step. After a group-relative policy optimization (GRPO) update, it observes learnability -- the mean absolute advantage on the batch -- and transferability -- the cosine between a low-dimensional gradient sketch of the current harness and exponential moving averages of the remaining harnesses. The two signals are fused after pooled sliding-window min-max normalization and sampled with a visit-dependent bonus and an explicit exploration floor. We train Qwen3.5-2B across six harnesses on ClawGym and evaluate on PinchBench (held-out tasks, in-distribution OpenClaw) and ClawEval (held-out tasks and harness). HarnessBandit improves over mixed-batch multi-harness training on both benchmarks, while training diagnostics indicate that learnability and transferability provide distinct, evolving signals.

Key facts. Cited by 1 paper 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 27 of its 39 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 12 Sep 2026.

Builds on

27 of 39 references.

Closest ancestors · 1

Same direction, newest first

  1. 2024OpenHands: An Open Platform for AI Software Developers as Generalist Agents23 Jul

Other references · 26

  1. 2022Training language models to follow instructions with human feedbackcited by 15,971
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  3. 2022ReAct: Synergizing Reasoning and Acting in Language Modelscited by 8,695
  4. 2023Toolformer: Language Models Can Teach Themselves to Use Toolscited by 4,182
  5. 2025DAPO: An Open-Source LLM Reinforcement Learning System at Scalecited by 2,810
  6. 2023WebArena: A Realistic Web Environment for Building Autonomous Agentscited by 2,006
  7. 2023ToolLLM: Facilitating Large Language Models to Master 16000+ Real-world APIscited by 1,947
  8. 2019Megatron-LM: Training Multi-Billion Parameter Language Models Using Model Parallelismcited by 1,868
  9. 2019Similarity of Neural Network Representations Revisitedcited by 1,755
  10. 2024τ-bench: A Benchmark for Tool-Agent-User Interaction in Real-World Domainscited by 1,402
  11. 2025Understanding R1-Zero-Like Training: A Critical Perspectivecited by 1,345
  12. 2023AgentBench: Evaluating LLMs as Agentscited by 1,267
14 more
  1. 2020Gradient Surgery for Multi-Task Learningcited by 1,256
  2. 2014How transferable are features in deep neural networks?cited by 1,225
  3. 2018Multi-Task Learning as Multi-Objective Optimizationcited by 821
  4. 2017An Overview of Multi-Task Learning in Deep Neural Networkscited by 803
  5. 2023DoReMi: Optimizing Data Mixtures Speeds Up Language Model Pretrainingcited by 399
  6. 2020Curriculum Learning for Reinforcement Learning Domains: A Framework and Surveycited by 373
  7. 2016Successor Features for Transfer in Reinforcement Learningcited by 340
  8. 2017Automated Curriculum Learning for Neural Networkscited by 257
  9. 2024A Survey on Data Selection for Language Modelscited by 236
  10. 2017Distral: Robust Multitask Reinforcement Learningcited by 233
  11. 2015Actor-Mimic: Deep Multitask and Transfer Reinforcement Learningcited by 178
  12. 2020Automatic Curriculum Learning For Deep RL: A Short Surveycited by 150
  13. 2026Polar: Agentic RL on Any Harness at Scalecited by 14
  14. 2026Transferability for General Reasoning: An Automated Curriculum for Multi-Domain RLVRcited by 5

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Cited by year (2026 to 14 Oct)

Citing papers per year: 2026: 1.

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  1. 2026HarnessBridge: Learnable Bidirectional Controller for LLM Agent Harness
  2. 2026Harness-RL: Black-Box Reinforcement Learning with Action-Args Decoupling for Central-Agent Multi-Agent Harnesses
  3. 2026Learning to Control LLM Agent Harnesses with Offline Reinforcement Learning
  4. 2026Harness-Zero: Harness Distillation via Agent-as-Harness
  5. 2026HarnessCompass: Guiding Automatic Harness Evolution toward Generalizable and Effective Agent Harnesses
  6. 2026HarnessX: A Composable, Adaptive, and Evolvable Agent Harness Foundry
  7. 2026Harness Learning Enables Generalizable Test-Time Adaptation
  8. 2026CHART: A Harness-Rotation Curriculum for Harness-Robust Search Agents