The Interplay of Harness Design and Post-Training in LLM Agents

Abstract:Tool-integrated LLM agents are often wrapped within a harness: the scaffolding that determines which tools are exposed, how they are described, and what auxiliary information accompanies each per-step observation. While agents are routinely post-trained, this scaffolding is typically treated as a fixed engineering detail, with design effort limited to the training-free regime. Moreover, existing post-training algorithms assume a static environment, even though tool environments and tasks often shift upon deployment. To address this gap, we extend $\texttt{ALFWorld}$ (i) to treat the harness as a controllable design dimension and (ii) to support evaluation under task and tool environment shifts. Building on this, we systematically analyze how the harness design influences post-training in both in-distribution and out-of-distribution (OOD) settings. We empirically show that harness-aware post-training not only improves in-distribution performance but also enables agents to robustly adapt to OOD settings. Under a harness with minimal design effort, post-training suffers a drastic performance drop under stronger tool environment shifts, further highlighting the importance of harness-aware post-training under such shifts.

Machine Learning (cs.LG); Computation and Language (cs.CL)

arXiv:2606.25447 [cs.LG]

(or arXiv:2606.25447v2 [cs.LG] for this version)

https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2606.25447 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite

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