arXiv:2605.21516cs.LGcs.AI2026-05被引 1

通过轨迹对齐分析,发现智能体推理时的分解与引导需适度,过度反而降低成功率。

Harnesses for Inference-Time Alignment over Execution Trajectories

论文配图:Harnesses for Inference-Time Alignment over Execution Trajectories
图 1 · 摘自论文原文
  • 将推理过程拆解为任务分解与执行引导两种机制,量化其影响
  • 实验发现过度分解或过度修剪会降低任务成功率,存在幻觉执行等失败模式
  • 只需设计初始步骤,让智能体自主完成后续,效果优于全结构化流程

Harness 工程已成为大语言模型智能体的重要推理时技术,旨在通过任务分解和引导执行提升长期性能。然而更复杂的 harness 并非总是更优:增加分解或引导有时能改善执行,也可能降低最终任务成功率。本文从推理时轨迹对齐的角度研究 harness 设计,将 harness 分解为两类机制:任务分解(将任务拆分为子目标)和引导执行(在执行过程中重塑局部动作分布)。这一拆分使我们能够量化工作流粒度、重试预算以及引导导致的动作重加权如何影响 harness 性能上限,并揭示了具体失败模式,包括过分解、过修剪和幻觉执行。通过受控合成实验和真实终端智能体基准验证了这些预测。基于理论启发,进一步表明有效 harness 可以是部分结构化的:仅指定初始步骤,让智能体自主完成剩余执行,可实现比完全结构化流程更高的通过率。

原文摘要 · Abstract (English)

Harness engineering has emerged as an important inference-time technique for large language model (LLM) agents, aiming to improve long-term performance through task decomposition and guided execution. However, more elaborate harnesses are not uniformly better: increasing decomposition or guidance can sometimes improve execution, but can also reduce final task success. We study harness design through the lens of inference-time trajectory alignment. This perspective separates harness into two mechanisms: task decomposition, which structures a task into sub-goals, and guided execution, which reshapes local action distributions during execution. This decomposition allows us to quantify how workflow granularity, retry budgets, and guidance-induced action reweighting shape the performance limits of harness design. It further reveals concrete failure modes, including over-decomposition, over-pruning, and hallucinated execution. We validate these predictions through controlled synthetic experiments and real terminal agent benchmarks. Inspired by the theory, we further show that effective harnesses can be partial: specifying only the initial steps and leaving the remaining execution to agent can achieve higher pass rate than fully structured workflows.

智能体推理优化轨迹对齐

Thank you to arXiv for use of its open access interoperability. PaperDance 不是 arXiv 官方产品;中文卡片由大模型生成,请以原文为准。