Harness-Zero: Harness Distillation via Agent-as-Harness
Quick summary
arXiv:2609.24974v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Agent harnesses, the external systems that mediate model-environment interaction, can substantially improve agent performance, but their gains remain tied to the harness at deployment. Because the best harness varies across domains, instances, and models, a general-purpose agent must either settle for a suboptimal shared harness or route among an ever-growing set of specialized ones. We therefore study agent harness distillation: using a domain- or instance-optimized harness as training-time guidance and transferring the behaviors it induces into
Key takeaways
- arXiv:2609.24974v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Agent harnesses, the external systems that mediate model-environment interaction, can substantially improve agent performance, but their gains remain tied to the harness at deployment.
- Because the best harness varies across domains, instances, and models, a general-purpose agent must either settle for a suboptimal shared harness or route among an ever-growing set of specialized ones.
- We therefore study agent harness distillation: using a domain- or instance-optimized harness as training-time guidance and transferring the behaviors it induces into
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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