English

Polar: Agentic RL on Any Harness at Scale

Distributed, Parallel, and Cluster Computing 2026-05-26 v1

Abstract

Reinforcement learning for language agents increasingly depends on custom harnesses that manage long-running context, multi-turn tool use and multi-agent orchestration. However, porting these harnesses into RL environment interfaces remains difficult and often loses important training signals. We bridge this gap with polar, a rollout framework for scalable asynchronous RL over arbitrary agent harnesses. Polar treats the agent harness as a black box: it proxies LLM API calls, records token-level model interactions, and reconstructs token-faithful trajectories for training. Each rollout node efficiently manages runtime prewarming, agent execution, trajectory reconstruction, and evaluation in parallel, exposing asynchronous service endpoints that can be consumed by independent trainers at scale. This decoupled design makes Polar agnostic to agent harnesses, training infrastructure, and RL algorithms while improving compute utilization for long-running agent workloads. We validate polar by training agents on software-engineering tasks with popular coding harnesses. Using simple GRPO, polar improves Qwen3.5-4B by 22.6, 4.8, 0.6 and 6.2 points on SWE-Bench Verified with the Codex, Claude Code, Qwen Code and Pi harnesses, respectively. We further demonstrate Polar for offline data generation over custom harnesses and ablate trajectory reconstruction strategies. Polar rewrites its preceding work, Prorl Agent, and has been registered as one of NeMo Gym environments.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2605.24220,
  title  = {Polar: Agentic RL on Any Harness at Scale},
  author = {Binfeng Xu and Hao Zhang and Shaokun Zhang and Songyang Han and Mingjie Liu and Jian Hu and Shizhe Diao and Zhenghui Jin and Yunheng Zou and Michael Demoret and Jan Kautz and Yi Dong},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2605.24220},
  year   = {2026}
}

Comments

17 pages, 6 figures. 2 tables

R2 v1 2026-07-22T07:29:27.850Z