EvoHarnessBench shows adding tools to agents can cause forgetting of solved tasks
mohitban47 · x · 2026-09-12
Researchers introduce EvoHarnessBench, a benchmark for self-evolving agents facing a neglected form of continual adaptation: the harness itself evolves as tools, skills, and specialist agents are progressively added, while previously solved tasks stay in the evaluation.
Key findings:
- Harness expansion induces forgetting — each capability upgrade can degrade performance on tasks the agent already solved;
- Current self-evolving methods fail to recover reliably: today's agents cannot consistently retain earlier competence while adapting to new capabilities.
The benchmark probes the trade-off between growing capability and retaining old skills, suggesting that stacking features onto agentic systems is not a free upgrade.
Related event: EvoHarnessBench: Adding More Tools to Agents Can Make Them Worse(2 posts)→
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