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arXiv · 2605.09998

Continual Harness: Online Adaptation for Self-Improving Foundation Agents

Seth Karten·Joel Zhang·Tersoo Upaa Jr·Ruirong Feng·Wenzhe Li·Chengshuai Shi·Chi Jin·Kiran Vodrahalli
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Abstract

Coding harnesses such as Claude Code and OpenHands wrap foundation models with tools, memory, and planning, but no equivalent exists for embodied agents' long-horizon partial-observability decision-making. We first report our Gemini Plays Pokemon (GPP) experiments. With iterative human-in-the-loop harness refinement, GPP became the first AI system to complete Pokemon Blue, Yellow Legacy on hard mode, and Crystal without a lost battle. In the hardest stages, the agent itself began iterating on its strategy through long-context memory, surfacing emergent self-improvement signals alongside human-in-the-loop refinement. Continual Harness removes the human fully from this loop: a reset-free self-improving harness for embodied agents that formalizes and automates what we observed. Starting from only a minimal environment interface, the agent alternates between acting and refining its own prompt, sub-agents, skills, and memory, drawing on any past trajectory data. Prompt-optimization methods require episode resets; Continual Harness adapts online within a single run. On Pokemon Red and Emerald across frontier models, Continual Harness starting from scratch substantially reduces button-press cost relative to the minimalist baseline and recovers a majority of the gap to a hand-engineered expert harness, with capability-dependent gains, despite starting from the same raw interface with no curated knowledge, no hand-crafted tools, and no domain scaffolding. We then close the loop with the model itself: an online process-reward co-learning loop, in which an open-source agent's rollouts through the refining harness are relabeled by a frontier teacher and used to update the model, drives sustained in-game milestone progress on Pokemon Red without resetting the environment between training iterations.

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Seth Karten, Joel Zhang, Tersoo Upaa Jr, Ruirong Feng, Wenzhe Li, Chengshuai Shi, Chi Jin, Kiran Vodrahalli. 2026-05-11. Continual Harness: Online Adaptation for Self-Improving Foundation Agents. https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.09998

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