mlsanityData to 7 Oct 2026

SoL-Pi: Recursively Scaling Auto-Research Loops for Efficient Agent Harness

arXiv 2609.20519 ↗First posted 17 Sep 2026cs.AIcited by 2

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

Abstract (arXiv)

As coding agents move from supervised code completion to unattended, around-the-clock exploration, their work expands from isolated predictions into long trajectories of reasoning, tool use, and feedback. Token efficiency therefore becomes important for scaling recursive self-improvement. We take an RSI-inspired approach at the harness layer, scaling auto-research loops across increasingly numerous and diverse environments for harness rollouts. At this scale, the process yields reusable improvements that transfer beyond their development setting, moving automated harness discovery toward production-level outcomes. Four mechanisms survive selection and form SoL-Pi, spanning action execution, context compaction, observation handling, and delegated reading. On the 51-task EdgeBench evaluation, SoL-Pi achieves performance comparable to Pi across GPT-5.6 Sol and Opus 5 while reducing recorded token traffic by 44.7-49.0% and API cost by about one third. In other words, estimated hourly savings are 8.75-13.50 relative to native Codex and Claude Code harnesses, and 4.36-5.71 relative to Pi.

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 32 of its 52 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 17 Sep 2026.

Builds on

32 of 52 references.

Closest ancestors · 10

Same direction, newest first

  1. 2026MemoHarness: Agent Harnesses That Learn from Experience14 Jul
  2. 2026Rethinking the Evaluation of Harness Evolution for Agents14 Jul
  3. 2026LLM-as-Code: Agentic Programming for Agent Harness14 Jun
  4. 2026Recursive Agent Harnesses11 Jun
  5. 2026Code as Agent Harness18 May
  6. 2026Agentic Harness Engineering: Observability-Driven Automatic Evolution of Coding-Agent Harnesses28 Apr
  7. 2025Context as a Tool: Context Management for Long-Horizon SWE-Agents26 Dec
  8. 2025Reducing Cost of LLM Agents with Trajectory Reduction28 Sep
  9. 2024AFlow: Automating Agentic Workflow Generation14 Oct
  10. 2024SWE-agent: Agent-Computer Interfaces Enable Automated Software Engineering6 May

Other references · 22

  1. 2021Evaluating Large Language Models Trained on Codecited by 8,053
  2. 2023Efficient Memory Management for Large Language Model Serving with PagedAttentioncited by 5,767
  3. 2023FlashAttention-2: Faster Attention with Better Parallelism and Work Partitioningcited by 2,551
  4. 2022GPTQ: Accurate Post-Training Quantization for Generative Pre-trained Transformerscited by 1,838
  5. 2022SmoothQuant: Accurate and Efficient Post-Training Quantization for Large Language Modelscited by 1,338
  6. 2022Scaling Laws for Reward Model Overoptimizationcited by 1,056
  7. 2023FrugalGPT: How to Use Large Language Models While Reducing Cost and Improving Performancecited by 791
  8. 2024RouteLLM: Learning to Route LLMs with Preference Datacited by 633
  9. 2026Terminal-Bench: Benchmarking Agents on Hard, Realistic Tasks in Command Line Interfacescited by 515
  10. 2025GEPA: Reflective Prompt Evolution Can Outperform Reinforcement Learningcited by 449
  11. 2025The AI Scientist-v2: Workshop-Level Automated Scientific Discovery via Agentic Tree Searchcited by 375
  12. 2024Automated Design of Agentic Systemscited by 360
10 more
  1. 2025Agentic Context Engineering: Evolving Contexts for Self-Improving Language Modelscited by 349
  2. 2025Darwin Godel Machine: Open-Ended Evolution of Self-Improving Agentscited by 294
  3. 2026Meta-Harness: End-to-End Optimization of Model Harnessescited by 248
  4. 2024AgentSquare: Automatic LLM Agent Search in Modular Design Spacecited by 141
  5. 2025Scaling Long-Horizon LLM Agent via Context-Foldingcited by 136
  6. 2025ACON: Optimizing Context Compression for Long-horizon LLM Agentscited by 126
  7. 2025AgentFold: Long-Horizon Web Agents with Proactive Context Managementcited by 95
  8. 2026AutoHarness: improving LLM agents by automatically synthesizing a code harnesscited by 63
  9. 2026Hyperagentscited by 40
  10. 2026Recursive Harness Self-Improvementcited by 22

Built on by

Cited by year (2026 to 7 Oct)

Citing papers per year: 2026: 2.

2 papers.

Similar, not cited

Close in wording, no citation either way

  1. 2026Mixture of Self-Improving Branches For Agent Harness Optimization
  2. 2026ModularRSI: Modular and Generalizable Recursive Harness Self-Improvement
  3. 2026Effective Harness Engineering for Algorithm Discovery with Coding Agents
  4. 2026An Empirical Study of Harness Design for Coding Agents
  5. 2026Dynamic Harness Search: Building Multi-Agent Systems Per-Query via Prediction
  6. 2026Harness Engineering: Anatomy, Architecture, and Evolution of Coding Agents -- A Source-Code Study of Eleven Systems
  7. 2026LoopsBench: From Harness Engineering to Loop Engineering in Coding Agent Evaluation
  8. 2026Composing Task-specific Agent Harnesses at Test Time with Reusable Primitives