Your Policy Is Secretly a Harness: The Decision Geometry of Agent Interfaces

Original abstract

Language model agents are post-trained and deployed through a harness, the prompts, tools, and control logic that present a task to the model and execute its outputs. Harnesses are often revised and judged by how an already trained model performs under them, which assumes that what the model learned under one harness carries over to the next. We ask what a policy learns from its harness and what survives when the harness changes. Under KL-regularized control, we show that the log odds of an optimal policy recover how strongly its harness favors each action over the others, so a trained policy carries the preferences of its harness. Deployed return then equals the ceiling of the harness, the best return it offers, minus the mismatch of the policy, the return lost to its own suboptimal decisions. Training changes only the mismatch, while changing the harness moves both terms. Comparing harnesses with a fixed model therefore mixes what each harness offers with how well that model uses it. In MiniWoB++, post-training makes a model's preferences specific to its training harness. Reversing the order of the observation fields leaves every optimal decision unchanged yet lowers a trained model's success from 85.0% to 19.2%. Conversely, every new harness that a fixed-model comparison rejects but that raises the ceiling outperforms the original agent after further training under it, and ceiling and mismatch measured beforehand predict these gains. For coding-agent harnesses on Terminal-Bench Lite, ceiling minus mismatch estimated with a stronger model as a stand-in for the optimum reproduces the accuracy ranking, while either term alone does not. Code is available at https://github.com/2020-qqtcg/HRP.