研究指出强模型智能体在自主机器学习工程中几乎不需要复杂 harness
How Much of a Harness Does a Strong Agent Need for Autonomous ML Engineering?
EPFL 与 Apple 研究者发表论文，发现在相同时间预算和同一前沿 LLM 骨干下，开源最先进 harness 并不优于最小化 harness 编码智能体的单次会话。通过大规模系统性消融研究，作者认为复杂机制层在编码智能体场景中变得冗余，性能主要由 LLM 骨干驱动，为强模型手工搭建复杂 harness 的投入在当前 MLE 基准上回报很低。
AuthorsKirill Brilliantov†‡, Alejandro Hernández-Cano†‡**, Emmanuel Abbé†
Recent autonomous machine learning engineering (MLE) agents have made significant progress on public leaderboards. Often motivated by progress stagnation over long-horizon cycles and limited Large Language Model (LLM) primitives, modern MLE agents are deployed on top of increasingly elaborate machinery: multi-agent orchestrators, dedicated retrieval subagents, and more. While such harnesses expand, the use of more primitive but improved coding agents—where LLMs have direct access to the execution environment through read, write, and bash primitives—has received little attention in the field. In this paper we find that, under an equal time budget and the same frontier LLM backbone, open-source state-of-the-art harnesses provide no advantages over a single session of a minimal-harness coding agent baseline, pointing to the backbone as the primary driver for performance. Via a series of large-scale systematic ablation studies, we argue that the machinery layers become redundant in the coding agent setting. We conclude that the effort spent elaborating hand-crafted harnesses around strong models yields poor returns for current MLE benchmarks.
- † EPFL
- ‡ Equal contribution
- ** Work done while at Apple
Related readings and updates.
Continual-learning agents are systems of models, harnesses, and memory operating over long multi-session horizons. Evaluating and training them requires interleaving tasks with agent-side events such as session stop and start, crons, and memory consolidation. Yet existing benchmarks and training frameworks schedule only the benchmark’s own events, leaving each benchmark and agent pair to build a custom scheduling loop. We present SCLATE, an…
Interface agents powered by generative AI models (referred to as “agents”) can automate actions based on user commands. An important aspect of developing agents is their user experience (i.e., agent experience). There is a growing need to provide scaffolds for a broader set of individuals beyond AI engineers to prototype agent experiences, since they can contribute valuable perspectives to designing agent experiences. In this work, we explore the…
来源：Apple Machine Learning Research · machinelearning.apple.com