Paper Detail

Natural-Language Agent Harnesses

Linyue Pan, Lexiao Zou, Shuo Guo, Jingchen Ni, Hai-Tao Zheng

arxiv Score 13.6

Published 2026-03-26 · First seen 2026-03-27

General AI

Abstract

Agent performance increasingly depends on \emph{harness engineering}, yet harness design is usually buried in controller code and runtime-specific conventions, making it hard to transfer, compare, and study as a scientific object. We ask whether the high-level control logic of an agent harness can instead be externalized as a portable executable artifact. We introduce \textbf{Natural-Language Agent Harnesses} (NLAHs), which express harness behavior in editable natural language, and \textbf{Intelligent Harness Runtime} (IHR), a shared runtime that executes these harnesses through explicit contracts, durable artifacts, and lightweight adapters. Across coding and computer-use benchmarks, we conduct controlled evaluations of operational viability, module ablation, and code-to-text harness migration.

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BibTeX

@article{pan2026natural,
  title = {Natural-Language Agent Harnesses},
  author = {Linyue Pan and Lexiao Zou and Shuo Guo and Jingchen Ni and Hai-Tao Zheng},
  year = {2026},
  abstract = {Agent performance increasingly depends on \textbackslash{}emph\{harness engineering\}, yet harness design is usually buried in controller code and runtime-specific conventions, making it hard to transfer, compare, and study as a scientific object. We ask whether the high-level control logic of an agent harness can instead be externalized as a portable executable artifact. We introduce \textbackslash{}textbf\{Natural-Language Agent Harnesses\} (NLAHs), which express harness behavior in editable natural language, and \textbackslash{}textbf\{Intel},
  url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.25723},
  keywords = {cs.CL, cs.AI},
  eprint = {2603.25723},
  archiveprefix = {arXiv},
}

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