Harmony Harness: Multi-Objective Self-Evolution of Agent Harnesses
On the map: LLM agents and tool use → Software engineering coding agents also fits: General LLM agent frameworks and benchmarks
Abstract (arXiv)
Recent work on self-evolving LLM agents treats the agent harness as an optimization target that can be iteratively improved through execution feedback. Existing approaches, however, largely optimize a single objective and evolve the harness as a monolithic artifact, limiting their ability to handle competing goals and to separate transferable design from environment-specific adaptation. We introduce Harmony Harness, a framework for multi-objective, compositional harness evolution. Harmony Harness formulates harness evolution as a multi-objective optimization problem and uses decomposition-based evolutionary search to maintain solutions across different regions of the Pareto frontier, avoiding reliance on a hand-designed structural diversity metric for repository-scale harnesses. In parallel, we introduce factorized evolution operators that separately refine general-purpose harness mechanisms and benchmark-specific adaptations, together with a dynamic composition workflow that integrates them at inference time. Across SecRepoBench and BaxBench, Harmony Harness consistently outperforms strong harness-evolution baselines, with gains exceeding 10% on both benchmarks. Our results show that explicitly modeling both objective trade-offs and harness structure yields substantially stronger and more transferable agent evolution than existing single-objective, monolithic approaches.
Key facts. No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026). Placed in Software engineering coding agents, one of 16 directions in LLM agents and tool use. Builds on 32 of its 38 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 10 Oct 2026.
Builds on
32 of 38 references.
Closest ancestors · 5
Same direction, newest first
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- 2024Self-Evolving Multi-Agent Collaboration Networks for Software Development22 Oct
- 2024AFlow: Automating Agentic Workflow Generation14 Oct
Other references · 27
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- 2023Identifying the Risks of LM Agents with an LM-Emulated Sandboxcited by 548
- 2025GEPA: Reflective Prompt Evolution Can Outperform Reinforcement Learningcited by 542
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15 more
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- 2024ST-WebAgentBench: A Benchmark for Evaluating Safety and Trustworthiness in Web Agentscited by 133
- 2023Beyond One-Preference-Fits-All Alignment: Multi-Objective Direct Preference Optimizationcited by 124
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- 2024Agent-Pro: Learning to Evolve via Policy-Level Reflection and Optimizationcited by 94
- 2025ThetaEvolve: Test-time Learning on Open Problemscited by 64
- 2025CWEval: Outcome-driven Evaluation on Functionality and Security of LLM Code Generationcited by 59
- 2025BaxBench: Can LLMs Generate Correct and Secure Backends?cited by 41
- 2024Survival of the Safest: Towards Secure Prompt Optimization through Interleaved Multi-Objective Evolutioncited by 9
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