cs.MAJul 29, 2026

Living-Harness Is an Interactive-Agent Evolver

Authors: Yuetian DuYucheng WangHe XuJiexu XuShanwen TanBing ZhaoBoyu YangZhijie Xu+4 more

Organizations: Zhejiang University · The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology · Alibaba Group · University of Michigan · City University of Hong Kong

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 τ2τ^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. Our code will be made publicly available soon at https://github.com/anotherbricki/Living-Harness.

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