Auditing Harness Tampering in Self-Improving Agents
Quick summary
arXiv:2609.00069v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Self-improving agents iteratively modify their own harness to push the frontier of their performance. However, such modifications can produce illusory performance gains or compromise integrity constraints such as authorization, provenance, and completeness without genuinely improving capability. We term this phenomenon as harness tampering, which extends the concept from reward and measurement tampering to the full self-improvement lifecycle. To systematically study this problem, we propose a two-axis taxonomy that categorizes each misaligned e
Key takeaways
- arXiv:2609.00069v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Self-improving agents iteratively modify their own harness to push the frontier of their performance.
- However, such modifications can produce illusory performance gains or compromise integrity constraints such as authorization, provenance, and completeness without genuinely improving capability.
- We term this phenomenon as harness tampering, which extends the concept from reward and measurement tampering to the full self-improvement lifecycle.
Why it matters
The value of this work lies as much in how it was tested as in the claim itself. Sample design, baselines, uncertainty and replication help separate a laboratory result from real-world impact.
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