mlsanityData to 7 Oct 2026

VeriHarness: Scaling Agentic Verification for Long-Horizon Tasks

arXiv 2610.00972 ↗First posted 1 Oct 2026cs.AI cs.MAcited by 0

On the map: LLM agents and tool use → Software engineering coding agents also fits: General LLM agent frameworks and benchmarks

Abstract (arXiv)

As LLM agents undertake increasingly complex, long-horizon tasks, verifying their outputs becomes increasingly challenging. We study how verification capability can be strengthened with a fixed base model, without access to reference answers or grading rubrics at test time. Repeated sampling yields multiple rollouts that can contain complementary correct claims, but we need a reliable verification mechanism to determine which claims to trust. We first find that disagreement often exposes correct alternatives, while consensus can conceal errors. These observations motivate VeriHarness, which turns the underlying LLM a generator uses into an agentic verifier by giving it a workspace, evidence tools, and reusable verification skills. A disagreement resolver checks competing claims against environmental evidence, while a consensus challenger tests shared claims and searches for omitted requirements. Their findings guide the selection and revision of the final artifact. Across five long-horizon workspace benchmarks and two frontier models, VeriHarness achieves the highest selection scores among the evaluated baselines. Evidence-backed revision further improves average performance, bringing gains over a single rollout to 6.2 points with Gemini 3.5 Flash and 6.4 points with Claude Opus 4.8. We further show that verification skills can self-improve from failure feedback, demonstrating VeriHarness as a novel and critical approach for scaling long-horizon agentic verification. We release the full pool of approximately 26,000 rollouts across all five benchmarks and both models, produced at a cost of over 100,000, to support future research on agentic verification.

Key facts. No citing papers in the map yet (data through 7 Oct 2026). Placed in Software engineering coding agents, one of 16 directions in LLM agents and tool use. Builds on 44 of its 51 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 1 Oct 2026.

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44 of 51 references.

Closest ancestors · 5

Same direction, newest first

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  2. 2026Tencent WorkBuddy Bench: A Multi-Domain Coding-Agent Benchmark with Contamination-Resistant Task Construction23 Jul
  3. 2026Rethinking the Evaluation of Harness Evolution for Agents14 Jul
  4. 2026Self-Harness: Harnesses That Improve Themselves8 Jun
  5. 2026Agentic Harness Engineering: Observability-Driven Automatic Evolution of Coding-Agent Harnesses28 Apr

Other references · 39

  1. 2021Training Verifiers to Solve Math Word Problemscited by 9,743
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  3. 2022Self-Consistency Improves Chain of Thought Reasoning in Language Modelscited by 5,601
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  6. 2023Large Language Models Cannot Self-Correct Reasoning Yetcited by 965
  7. 2024Large Language Monkeys: Scaling Inference Compute with Repeated Samplingcited by 946
  8. 2022Large Language Models Can Self-Improvecited by 656
  9. 2024Generative Verifiers: Reward Modeling as Next-Token Predictioncited by 465
  10. 2023Weak-to-Strong Generalization: Eliciting Strong Capabilities With Weak Supervisioncited by 445
  11. 2024Mixture-of-Agents Enhances Large Language Model Capabilitiescited by 420
  12. 2018AI safety via debatecited by 384
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  7. 2022Measuring Progress on Scalable Oversight for Large Language Modelscited by 212
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  10. 2026CoEvoSkills: Self-Evolving Agent Skills via Co-Evolutionary Verificationcited by 117
  11. 2025S*: Test Time Scaling for Code Generationcited by 95
  12. 2025Scaling Test-time Compute for LLM Agentscited by 59
  13. 2025Multi-Agent Verification: Scaling Test-Time Compute with Multiple Verifierscited by 58
  14. 2025Great Models Think Alike and this Undermines AI Oversightcited by 53
  15. 2025Sample, Scrutinize and Scale: Effective Inference-Time Search by Scaling Verificationcited by 49
  16. 2025CodeMonkeys: Scaling Test-Time Compute for Software Engineeringcited by 46
  17. 2026LLM-as-a-Verifier: A General-Purpose Verification Frameworkcited by 21
  18. 2026Workspace-Bench 1.0: Benchmarking AI Agents on Workspace Tasks with Large-Scale File Dependenciescited by 20
  19. 2026Inference-Time Scaling of Verification: Self-Evolving Deep Research Agents via Test-Time Rubric-Guided Verificationcited by 19
  20. 2026Agentic Aggregation for Parallel Scaling of Long-Horizon Agentic Taskscited by 18
  21. 2025Pushing Test-Time Scaling Limits of Deep Search with Asymmetric Verificationcited by 12
  22. 2026AgentV-RL: Scaling Reward Modeling with Agentic Verifiercited by 12
  23. 2026SpreadsheetBench 2: Evaluating Agents on End-to-End Business Spreadsheet Workflowscited by 7
  24. 2026Architectural Design Decisions in AI Agent Harnessescited by 4
  25. 2026Self-Verification Dilemma: Experience-Driven Suppression of Overused Checking in LLM Reasoningcited by 3
  26. 2026SEVA: Self-Evolving Verification Agent with Process Reward for Fact Attributioncited by 3
  27. 2026FineVerify: Scaling Test-Time Compute with Fine-Grained Self-Verification for Agentic Searchcited by 1

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