HarnessFlow: MCTS-Guided Harness Optimization for LLM Agents

Authors: Zhi Hong , Qianlong Wang , Hongchen Wei , Aidan Wu , Daohong Ying , Mingze Kong , Bei Liu , Chong Luo

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Abstract: The performance of large language model (LLM) agents depends on both the underlying model and the harness that governs interaction with tools and the environment. Yet harness design remains largely manual, and automating it requires navigating an open-ended search space through costly end-to-end evaluations. We introduce HarnessFlow, a framework for optimizing complete executable harnesses under a limited candidate-evaluation budget, with the model and task environment held fixed. HarnessFlow organizes candidates and their evaluation histories in a refinement tree, using a Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS)-based policy to balance exploitation and exploration. A coding agent refines selected harnesses using archived code, execution feedback, and a library of reusable harness mechanisms. With 15 refinement attempts per benchmark, HarnessFlow achieves the highest mean test scores among the compared methods on six benchmarks spanning agentic tasks, coding, and web interaction. The optimized harnesses achieve an average score of 69.48%, outperforming the initial harnesses and Meta-Harness by 10.89 and 3.95 percentage points, respectively, while incurring lower average per-task execution costs than hand-engineered baselines. These results suggest that structured harness search offers a promising route toward automating the design of capable and efficient LLM agents.

Comments:

18 pages, 8 figures, 7 tables

Subjects:

Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI)

Cite as:

arXiv:2611.06254 [cs.AI]

(or

arXiv:2611.06254v1 [cs.AI] for this version)

https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2611.06254

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arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)

Submission history

From: Zhi Hong [ view email ]

[v1]

Wed, 4 Nov 2026 10:05:15 UTC (320 KB)

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