Auditing Harness Tampering in Self-Improving Agents
Self-improving agents iteratively modify their own harness to push the frontier of their performance. However, such modifications can produce illusory performance gains or compromise integrity constraints such as authorization, provenance, and completeness without genuinely improving capability. We term this phenomenon as harness tampering, which extends the concept from reward and measurement tampering to the full self-improvement lifecycle. To systematically study this problem, we propose a two-axis taxonomy that categorizes each misaligned edit by the harness functional role in which it occurs and the obligation it violates. Then we build an annotated corpus by seeding tampered-benign ...
| Authors | Xing Wang, Xiaoyi Zhang, Jie Shao |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.CL |
| Published | 30 August 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 30 August 2026 |
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