Large language model (LLM) agents are usually improved by changing prompts, models, or hand-written workflows, while the execution harness around the model is treated as fixed infrastructure. We argue that this harness is itself a learnable control layer. We formalize harness operation as a finite-horizon Harness MDP, where a lightweight controller selects structural execution actions while the LLM executor remains frozen. The controller is trained from offline rollouts using advantage-weighted regression with only terminal task-rubric rewards. We also separate final task quality from a post-hoc Harness Maturity Score, which measures whether the harness follows reliable execution patterns rather than only whether the final answer is correct. This separation gives a finite-buffer view of harness learning: final-quality gains require high-return support in the offline buffer, while process behavior can shift whenever it aligns with advantage-weighted actions. Across six controlled domains and two public-benchmark adapters, the learned controller consistently improves verification behavior and selectively improves final task quality, with the largest gains on adapted tau-bench retail, adapted AgentBench DB-Bench, and coding with a calibrated structural verifier. Ablations against behavior cloning and Forced CHECK show that the gains are not explained by imitation or by simply adding checks. These results identify harness control as a learnable layer for frozen LLM agents, while showing that offline support limits when better process control becomes better final answers.
Reinforcement learning for coding agents increasingly relies on long-running agent harnesses to manage tool integration, repository contexts, and execution feedback. However, the native execution environments of these harnesses are inherently misaligned with policy-gradient training: environmental crashes and reward hacking corrupt outcome signals, while train-inference discrepancies decouple rollout behavior from policy updates. To address this, we present LEGO-RL, a framework that bridges native coding-agent harnesses with scalable policy-gradient optimization without modifying their internal control flow. LEGO-RL is built upon three pillars: (1) faithful optimization via in-process LLM proxying that captures raw generation streams for token-level alignment and robust trainer-side log-probability recomputation, even under harness-side compaction or re-serialization; (2) reliable execution via scalable sandbox orchestration featuring image caching and stage-wise defenses to mitigate reward hacking; and (3) observable training through an integrated plugin that automates validation and monitoring, paired with a Live UI for granular trajectory diagnostics. We evaluate LEGO-RL by training the sparse MoE model Qwen3.5-35B-A3B with GSPO across three native coding-agent harnesses. LEGO-RL improves Qwen3.5-35B-A3B across OpenHands SDK (64.0% to 70.4%), Claude Code (62.4% to 68.2%), and OpenCode (57.2% to 66.6%) on SWE-bench Verified, while maintaining a rollout-training probability correlation above 0.99.
Yiming Du, Yuxin Jiang, Tao Yuan et al.· 0 citations
This work introduces Harness-R1, the first method, to the authors' knowledge, that makes failure-conditioned, lifecycle-wide editing of an existing executable runtime a learned capability, and post-trains a dedicated harness engineer with online reinforcement learning so that its edits are optimized for the realized task success they produce.
Shuai Shao, Kangning Zhang, Qingyao Li et al.· 6 citations· ⚡2
EvoHarness-RL is introduced, which exposes Belief, Progress, and Experience (BPE) as policy-facing harness state and reveals two key dynamics: harness annealing, where training internalizes recurring harness-use patterns into the model policy and shifts the agent from frequent harness calls toward selective external-state access, and harness evolution, where progress updates and experience consolidation refine the harness into a compact, task-adaptive state substrate.
Xuying Ning, Dongqi Fu, Tianxin Wei et al.· 0 citations
This work presents a unified black-box RL framework for stable and scalable optimization of general agents through complex harnesses, supporting unified training across heterogeneous execution systems.
Huatong Song, Fei Bai, Ming Yang et al.· 0 citations
SINKFLEX-RL, a modular training system for RL in dual-control tool-use environments that combines a Gymnasium-compatible environment wrapper, a VERL-style rollout dataflow, group-relative policy optimization without a separate value model, and a sink-aware FlexAttention path designed to preserve model-specific sink scaling under causal and sliding-window masks is presented.
Zelei Cheng, Amritansh Mishra, Sambit Sahu et al.· 0 citations
The proposed AutoSaddler, an automatic harness optimization framework that formulates harness improvement as an offline learning problem and iteratively updates the harness using failure signals from mini-batches, suggests that automatic harness optimization is a promising path toward more performant and reliable agent systems.
Sungho Park, Wonjoong Kim, Rongyuan Tan et al.· 0 citations