Harness Scaling for Generalizable Agentic Reinforcement Learning

5 días 14 horas ago
arXiv:2610.29458v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Agent harnesses have become a central component of modern agentic systems, shaping how models use tools, manage context, and coordinate long-horizon interaction. Realizing the benefits of these harnesses depends on how effectively the underlying model can make use of them, motivating reinforcement learning directly through the harness. While recent efforts have explored harness diversification to reduce specialization to particular execution settings, how to systematically construct and organize harness diversity for cross-harness generalization remains insufficiently understood. This work studies Harness Scaling as a distinct scaling dimension for agentic RL, focusing on structured variation in how policies execute and interact with the same underlying task and environment. Concretely, we construct a factorized harness space, select a compact training subset with balanced factorial coverage, and organize cross-harness training through locality-aware task assignment. Across multiple benchmarks, model scales, and RL algorithms, Harness Scaling consistently improves generalization to unseen harness combinations. Moreover, policies trained through structured white-box harness variation transfer effectively to unseen external black-box harnesses, outperforming policies trained through a single complex black-box harness. These results establish harness diversity as a meaningful scaling dimension for agentic RL and highlight the importance of how this diversity is organized for cross-harness generalization.
Fei Bai, Huatong Song, Chuan Hao, Ran Tao, Jian Yang, Bryan Dai, Wayne Xin Zhao, Ji-Rong Wen

LTEM: LLM-Friendly Table-Enhanced Markdown for Table Understanding and Generation

5 días 14 horas ago
arXiv:2610.29188v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Tables in real-world documents, including scientific papers, financial reports, and statistical summaries, frequently use merged cells, multi-level headers, and sectioned layouts. Yet the lightweight formats LLMs handle best (Markdown, CSV) cannot express these structures, while expressive formats (HTML, LaTeX) impose excessive token cost and parsing complexity. To enable systematic analysis of this trade-off, we introduce a taxonomy decomposing table structure into six atomic features (F1-F6) and corresponding complexity levels (L1-L6), and construct STB (Synthetic Table Benchmark), a controlled benchmark with 1,089 tables systematically distributed across complexity levels. Using this framework, we propose LTEM (LLM-friendly Table-Enhanced Markdown), a formally specified, minimal extension of Markdown that explicitly encodes spans and hierarchical headers. Experiments across five state-of-the-art LLMs show that LTEM achieves accuracy comparable to HTML, offers a favorable accuracy-token trade-off relative to HTML and LaTeX, and produces substantially fewer invalid responses than LaTeX; for table generation, LTEM is comparable to MultiMarkdown though HTML is best. We release our taxonomy, benchmark, and format specification to support future research on LLM-table interaction.
Eunbin Kim, Hyeonseok Kang, Sangkeun Jung

From AI-Free Gates to AI-First Work: How Engineering Students in India Navigate University Education and Career Preparation Without AI Guidelines

5 días 14 horas ago
arXiv:2610.29140v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Engineering graduates in India enter a technology sector that is being reshaped by generative AI, yet the route into that sector runs through examinations and campus placement screens that largely exclude AI. Institutions in India have an approved intake of nearly 2.9 million seats in engineering and technology for 2026-2027, but HCI research on how students prepare for AI-mediated work has drawn mostly on Western and East Asian settings. We interviewed 23 students and recent graduates of Indian engineering and computing programmes about how they used generative AI across coursework, examinations and placements, and how they judged their own readiness for work. Using reflexive thematic analysis, we report five themes, covering AI-first workplaces and AI-free placement screens, how participants prepared for placement, how they used AI in coursework, the role of faculty authority and enforcement, and participants' concerns about their readiness for work. Drawing on signaling theory, we discuss what grades and screen scores certify once AI can help produce them, and we offer recommendations for employers, institutions and AI tool designers.
Samhitha Goutham, Ziwei Gu

CountVideoBench: A Benchmark to Evaluate Prediction Biases on the Object Counting task by Video-Language Models

5 días 14 horas ago
arXiv:2610.28356v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Object counting in videos remains a poorly characterized capability of multimodal large language models. Counting questions are included in many existing VideoQA benchmarks, but the ground-truth count distributions in these benchmarks are heavily skewed toward small values. Across the nine benchmarks we survey, the median ground-truth count is at most five, and the three most frequent values together account for between 45% and 93% of the videos. The resulting mean accuracy is then dominated by the most frequent counts; a value-dependent bias at a rare count contributes negligibly to the average and remains invisible. We introduce CountVideoBench, a benchmark of 2,600 synthetic videos covering 26 cardinalities in the interval [5, 50] (100 videos each), grouped into six clusters of consecutive counts that span the range while enabling near-neighbor comparisons. Each video contains a single class of static objects under a controlled camera motion, removing object motion and reducing recognition as confounds. We evaluate sixteen video-language models from nine architecture families in a zero-shot setting. No model exceeds 27.6% Exact Match. The dependence of accuracy on cardinality varies across models, ranging from monotonic decline to a non-monotonic peak-and-collapse pattern, which rules out increasing difficulty with cardinality as the dominant explanation of counting failure. Every model further concentrates its predictions on its own set of preferred integers, with accuracy peaks coinciding with these values and collapsing at adjacent counts. These findings highlight the need for balanced, diagnostic counting benchmarks to reliably assess this fundamental visual capability.
Marc Chapus, Carlos Crispim-Junior, V\'eronique Eglin, Atilla Baskurt

Parameter-Efficient Adaptation of Time Series Foundation Models for Electrical Load Forecasting

5 días 14 horas ago
arXiv:2610.28200v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Accurate electrical load forecasting supports power-system operation across countries, regions, cities, and buildings, but repeated development of target-specific models is costly. Time series foundation models (TSFMs) provide reusable pretrained backbones, although multi-domain pretraining may not fully capture load-specific characteristics. This paper compares pretrained inference, full fine-tuning, and low-rank adaptation (LoRA) in terms of forecasting accuracy and adaptation efficiency across four electrical load aggregation levels. MOIRAI 1.0 Large serves as the primary backbone, while Chronos-2 assesses whether the findings transfer across model families. The evaluation covers both in-distribution (ID) and out-of-distribution (OOD) settings and examines whether compact adaptation provides consistent gains over strong pretrained checkpoints. Pretrained foundation models outperform the implemented seasonal naive and XGBoost baselines across the evaluated aggregation levels. On MOIRAI Large, rank-16 LoRA reduces normalized mean absolute error (NMAE) by 7.5% on average while updating 3.146 million parameters, about 1% of the model, and retains most of the improvement from full fine-tuning. Chronos-2 achieves lower pretrained NMAE than MOIRAI, while its relative adaptation gains remain smaller overall. OOD results show that adaptation benefits vary by target, with the clearest gains for the local-area series and several buildings. Overall, LoRA provides a favorable accuracy-efficiency trade-off when adaptation yields a meaningful gain over a strong pretrained checkpoint.
Aliullah, Julian Oelhaf, Edouard Fouch\'e, Jessica Deuschel, Christian Bergler, Andreas Maier, Siming Bayer

ClawMMU: Protection-Coherent Virtual Memory for Stateful LLM Agents

5 días 14 horas ago
arXiv:2610.28093v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: AI agents keep long-term memory, much of which comes from web pages and tool results. Agent harnesses, the software that runs the model, do not record who may act on this memory, so an instruction hidden in a fetched page can be treated as the user's own instruction. We propose ClawMMU, a protection layer that labels every piece of memory with its owner, scope, origins, and authority. ClawMMU checks these labels whenever content enters the model's context, is written to storage, returns from storage, or drives a tool call. Its central rule is that information may rise in authority, but authority never lifts itself. Because the checks depend on where content came from, not on what it says, memory attacks become classical protection faults that the harness stops even when the model is fooled.
Jinhao Hu, Bardia Mohammadi, Mofasshara Binte Rafique, Lars Henning Klein, Akhil Arora, Ashvin Goel, Laurent Bindschaedler

LoWAgent: A Low-Resource Multilingual Benchmark for Web Agents

5 días 14 horas ago
arXiv:2610.27205v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Web agents are typically evaluated on English-language interfaces, leaving their ability to operate across the world's multilingual websites largely unexplored. This gap is especially significant for low-resource languages, where standardized resources for evaluating web agents remain limited. To address this gap, we introduce Low-Resource Web Agent Benchmark (LoWAgent), a benchmark for evaluating web agents across different low-resource languages (LRLs) in comparison to the default, English. LoWAgent evaluates web agents across English and four LRLs: Hindi, Bengali, Urdu, and Amharic. The benchmark comprises of six fully localized websites, instantiated across five languages to yield 3,000 task instances. We evaluate three closed-source and five open-source models across all five languages on all six websites. Our findings show that both closed-source and open-source models experience performance degradation for LRLs compared to English, with substantially greater performance drops observed among the open-source model agents. We further evaluate the robustness of the models on realistic interface disruptions, such as cookie notices and advertisement pop-ups, and find that these further degrade agentic performance. Finally, we show that post-training on a small subset of LoWAgent traces can significantly improve low-resource language agentic task performance, demonstrating the usefulness of our benchmark.
Ocean Monjur, Daud Ahmad Nisar, Shahriar Kabir Nahin, Tadesse Destaw Belay, Sushruti Mishra, Israel Abebe Azime, Anshuman Chhabra

Reasoning-Aware Multicalibrated Reliability Predictors for Language Models

5 días 14 horas ago
arXiv:2610.26645v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: As people increasingly rely on large language models (LLMs) for information, model providers need to communicate meaningful estimates of whether individual responses are correct or, more generally, reliable. In the context of hallucinations, existing work uses multicalibration to make such reliability predictions meaningful across application-relevant groups, such as prompt topics. Topic groups alone, however, can conceal systematic errors: within the same topic and confidence level, responses with different chain-of-thought (CoT) properties may exhibit opposing errors that cancel on average. In this work, we introduce reasoning-aware multicalibration, a framework that supplements application-relevant topic groups with groups derived from observable properties of CoT traces. We highlight that, theoretically, groupings based on CoT are "internally important", i.e., groupings for which the multicalibration guarantee is not societally crucial as it is for high-risk topics, but whose inclusion in the multicalibration procedure could easily and significantly improve predictive accuracy of the final reliability predictor. Empirically, we apply our framework to hallucination prediction and unsafe-response detection across a variety of benchmarks, and find that adding CoT groups to topic-based calibration reduces Brier score in both tasks. Interestingly, we find that multicalibrating with respect to CoT groups alone (without any topic information) already improves calibration across topics, suggesting that the predictor's errors depend on how the model reasoned, rather than what it was asked about in the prompt.
Ekaterina Fedorova, Alessandro Morosini, Chara Podimata

SWIFT: Self-guided Weak-to-strong dIFfusion models via Target extrapolation

5 días 14 horas ago
arXiv:2610.25844v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Training high-quality diffusion models is computationally expensive, and inference-time guidance often adds further sampling cost. In this work, we introduce Swift, a simple yet effective self-guided training method that uses a frozen weak denoiser to improve a stronger model without adding inference overhead. For each noisy input, Swift extrapolates the clean regression target away from the weak denoiser's prediction, amplifying components that remain underfit. The weak guide can be an early training checkpoint, requires no backpropagation during main-model training, and is discarded afterward. The resulting model retains the original sampler and supports both conditional and unconditional generation without label dropout or an unconditional branch. We explain this mechanism through a spectral analysis of finite-time population gradient flow in an RKHS. With an early-stopped weak guide, we prove that a nonempty range of extrapolation strengths yields strictly lower posterior-mean error than matched standard training, despite shifting the regression target away from the posterior mean. Experiments on CIFAR-10 and ImageNet-256 demonstrate improvements across model scales and representations. In one ImageNet-256 configuration, Swift surpasses the baseline's best FID using roughly half the total training compute, including guide preparation and training overhead. On RAEv2, it achieves FID 1.15 without inference-time guidance and 0.99 with guidance. These results establish target extrapolation as an effective approach to weak-to-strong diffusion training with efficient single-model inference.
Yanjin He, Cuifeng Shen, Wanzhou Lei, Maohua Li, Tao Lan, Kan Liu, Hanlin Tang, Qing Qu

A learner-free swarm reaches the explore-exploit equilibrium: A self-organized attractor approximating the reinforcement-learning solution

5 días 14 horas ago
arXiv:2610.25113v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: The explore-exploit trade-off is the core problem of reinforcement learning (RL). In its multi-agent, resource-sharing form the optimum is not a scalar-return maximum but an equilibrium allocation -- the ideal-free distribution (IFD), the Nash equilibrium of a congestion game. We show that a minimal foraging swarm reaches the shape of this equilibrium as a self-organized attractor -- foragers in proportion to resource richness (matching slope 0.94) -- with no learner, no trained parameters, and no payoff or reward read anywhere in its dynamics. Agents explore by heavy-tailed (Levy) flights, recruit neighbours to a discovery through a threshold cascade on their proximity network, and disperse as a patch crowds; removing the coupling of recruitment to movement collapses the matching (slope 0.08). The reinforcement learning is at the level of the problem and the allocation reached, not the micro-rule. The swarm reaches this equilibrium rather than learning it, attaining its shape but not the exact equilibrium: it stays measurably exploitable (Nash-gap 0.58 versus ~0.01 for a converged learner). Against PPO learners (feedforward, centralized-critic, and graph message-passing) trained in the same sensing-limited environment, the reward-free swarm at zero training matches the IFD gradient more faithfully than any learner (slope ~1 vs 0.69-0.91) and ties the best learner's harvest where clustered (both plateau at ~0.80 of an oracle ceiling), while the learner collects more where resource is scarce (0.33 vs 0.22) and holds tighter per-capita intake. Learning thus buys precision and transfer, not a better allocation; neither message passing nor a centralized critic exceeds it at this budget. We read this not as beating RL, but as evidence that a minimal swarm's physics reaches the equilibrium RL seeks without a learner, a reward, or a trained parameter. A companion paper develops the mechanism.
Galen J. Wilkerson