AutoDesign: Meta-Harness Optimization for Long-Horizon Agentic Design

AI agents are increasingly deployed on complex, domain-specific workflows -- navigating enterprise web applications that require dozens of clicks and form fills, orchestrating multi-step research pipelines that span search, extraction, and synthesis, automating code review across unfamiliar repositories, and handling customer escalations that demand nuanced domain knowledge. \textbf{Each new task domain requires painstaking, expert-driven harness engineering}: designing the prompts, tools, orchestration logic, and evaluation criteria that make a foundation model effective. We present a two-level framework that automates this process. At the first level, the \textbf{Harness Evolution Loop} optimizes a worker agent's harness $\mathcal{H}$ for a single task: a Worker Agent $W_{\mathcal{H}}$ executes the task, an Evaluator Agent $V$ adversarially diagnoses failures and scores performance, and an Evolution Agent $E$ modifies the harness based on the full history of prior attempts. At the second level, the \textbf{Meta-Evolution Loop} optimizes the evolution blueprint $Λ= (W_{\mathcal{H}}, \mathcal{H}^{(0)}, V, E)$ itself across diverse tasks, \textbf{learning a blueprint $Λ^{(\text{best})}$ that enables rapid harness convergence on any new task -- so that adapting an agent to a novel domain requires no human harness engineering at all.} We formalize the correspondence to meta-learning and present both algorithms. The framework \textbf{shifts manual harness engineering into automated harness engineering}, and takes one step further -- \textbf{automating the design of the automation itself}.

Scientific poster construction compresses a long multimodal paper into a readable, editable canvas. Existing systems hide request-level failures by scoring only completed outputs; direct image generation is not element-editable, while coding-agent workflows are costly. PosterMELD is a template-conditioned multi-agent pipeline: capacity-aware slots guide writing before rendering, and deterministic gates plus vision-language model (VLM) review route failures to bounded repair. Each accepted request exports editable PowerPoint (PPTX) and Portable Network Graphics (PNG) artifacts; explicit design controls yield same-paper variants. Across 621 papers, Print-Ready Rate (PRR) counts requests passing geometric, readability, asset-integrity, and obvious-factual-error checks, with native editability reported separately. A frozen VLM assigns conditional Craftsmanship-Harmony-Expressiveness (CHE) scores to print-ready outputs. PosterMELD attains 81.3% PRR, 3.4 times P2P's rate and 5.2 times PosterGen's, and the highest conditional CHE among generated methods with multiple print-ready outputs. Native editability and explicit design controls are retained at a mean cost of USD 0.38 per request, 3.5% of Codex+Skill's. Code and resources are available at https://github.com/Shannon4Science/PosterMELD.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities as powerful components in agentic systems, enabling sophisticated reasoning and complex task execution. However, current approaches to manually designing and optimizing agentic systems heavily rely on manual effort, limiting their adaptability and scalability. Recent work has explored the automated optimization of workflow designs. However, these approaches often overlook the crucial role of model capabilities and focus on single performance metrics, failing to address real-world deployment constraints. In this paper, we present AgentFactory, a framework that jointly optimizes both foundation models and workflow structures in agentic systems while considering multiple objectives including performance, cost, and efficiency. AgentFactory leverages advanced LLMs as optimizers to navigate the vast search space of possible configurations, employing a three-stage optimization pipeline to automatically discover effective combinations of fine-tuned models and optimized workflows. Through an iterative optimization process, our framework systematically explores and evaluates different agentic system designs, adapting to task-specific requirements while maintaining operational efficiency. We evaluate AgentFactory across eight benchmarks spanning five domains, including general reasoning, coding, mathematics, medicine, and finance. Our experiments demonstrate that AgentFactory consistently outperforms both manually designed methods and existing automated approaches, achieving an average improvement of 9.1% across all benchmarks, with particularly significant gains in domain-specific tasks (19.6% on MedQA and 18.7% on FinEval). These results establish AgentFactory as a promising approach for developing more capable and efficient agentic systems through automated optimization.