EvolveNet: Collaborative Harness Evolution for Agent Self-Improvement

Abstract

An LLM agent can acquire persistent improvements by evolving its harness---the executable program governing model calls, tool use, verification, and recovery---without updating model weights. When the same harness serves users with different workloads, isolated evolution limits the sharing of useful discoveries, while centralized adaptation can introduce conflicting task-specific changes. We introduce EvolveNet, a framework for collaborative harness evolution that connects local specialization with shared capability accumulation. Clients evolve the same broadcast harness on their local workloads in parallel, and a server composes their adaptations into an updated shared program. Redistribution makes accepted discoveries available to all clients, allowing subsequent local evolution to build on improvements accumulated across the collaboration. EvolveNet supports this process through evidence-guided, scope-typed program aggregation and behavioral validation. Our theoretical analysis provides sufficient conditions for retaining and combining complementary improvements despite program interactions. Experiments across five settings show improved shared-harness performance, with ablation and behavioral analyses supporting the contribution of composition beyond specialist selection alone.

arXiv comment29 pages, 3 figures