English

Living-Harness Is an Interactive-Agent Evolver

Multiagent Systems 2026-07-29 v1 Artificial Intelligence Computation and Language

Abstract

Large language model (LLM) agents may recover from a failure within an episode or after a retry, yet the same execution failure can recur in later tasks because post-episode feedback rarely revises the persistent harness that guides future interactions. Static harnesses improve reliability through fixed tools, context, memory, and workflow structures, but remain unchanged after deployment. We propose Living-Harness\textbf{Living-Harness}, a self-evolving agent harness that converts each completed trajectory and its evaluator signals into posterior evidence for bounded harness updates. Guided by a domain-level Evolution-SOP\textbf{Evolution-SOP} (S\textbf{S}tandard O\textbf{O}perating P\textbf{P}rocedure), Living-Harness extracts an episode abstraction and structured update evidence, and writes two complementary forms of procedural knowledge: episodic memory that records trigger conditions, failure patterns, and recovery actions, and a state graph that records state nodes, repair edges, and transition rules. The updated harness state is retrieved to guide future interactions, while tools and base context remain frozen, allowing procedural repairs to accumulate across evolution cycles. On eight interactive environments derived from τ2\tau^2-Bench and MultiWOZ-2.4, Living-Harness improves average Pass@1 over the strongest interactive baseline by 10.07 and 9.91 percentage points, respectively, and supports retrieval-only reuse of the evolved harness state across model backbones.

Cite

@article{arxiv.2607.26598,
  title  = {Living-Harness Is an Interactive-Agent Evolver},
  author = {Yuetian Du and Yucheng Wang and He Xu and Jiexu Xu and Shanwen Tan and Bing Zhao and Boyu Yang and Zhijie Xu and Ming Kong and Hu Wei and Jie Liu and Qiang Zhu},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2607.26598},
  year   = {2026}
}