VeriHarness: Scaling Agentic Verification for Long-Horizon Tasks
cs.AI, cs.MA
Submitted: 2026-10-01
Updated: 2026-10-01
Code: https://github.com/google-research/veriharness
License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
The gist: As LLM agents undertake increasingly complex, long-horizon tasks, verifying their outputs becomes increasingly challenging.
Terminology
Abstract
As LLM agents undertake increasingly complex, long-horizon tasks, verifying their outputs becomes increasingly challenging. We study how verification capability can be strengthened with a fixed base model, without access to reference answers or grading rubrics at test time. Repeated sampling yields multiple rollouts that can contain complementary correct claims, but we need a reliable verification mechanism to determine which claims to trust. We first find that disagreement often exposes correct alternatives, while consensus can conceal errors. These observations motivate VeriHarness, which turns the underlying LLM a generator uses into an agentic verifier by giving it a workspace, evidence tools, and reusable verification skills. A disagreement resolver checks competing claims against environmental evidence, while a consensus challenger tests shared claims and searches for omitted requirements. Their findings guide the selection and revision of the final artifact. Across five long-horizon workspace benchmarks and two frontier models, VeriHarness achieves the highest selection scores among the evaluated baselines. Evidence-backed revision further improves average performance, bringing gains over a single rollout to 6.2 points with Gemini 3.5 Flash and 6.4 points with Claude Opus 4.8. We further show that verification skills can self-improve from failure feedback, demonstrating VeriHarness as a novel and critical approach for scaling long-horizon agentic verification. We release the full pool of approximately 26,000 rollouts across all five benchmarks and both models, produced at a cost of over 100,000, to support future research on agentic verification.
Sources
- Measuring Progress on Scalable Oversight for Large Language Models
- Training Verifiers to Solve Math Word Problems
- CodeMonkeys: Scaling Test-Time Compute for Software Engineering
- Evaluating Test-Time Scaling of General LLM Agents
- JobBench: Aligning Agent Work With Human Will
- Agentic Harness Engineering: Observability-Driven Automatic Evolution of Coding-Agent Harnesses
- TTHE: Test-Time Harness Evolution
- Workspace-Bench 1.0: Benchmarking AI Agents on Workspace Tasks with Large-Scale File Dependencies
- APEX-Agents
- Rethinking the Evaluation of Harness Evolution for Agents
- Tencent WorkBuddy Bench: A Multi-Domain Coding-Agent Benchmark with Contamination-Resistant Task Construction
- Agent-as-a-Judge
- SEVA: Self-Evolving Verification Agent with Process Reward for Fact Attribution
- Dockerless: Environment-Free Program Verifier for Coding Agents
- JIT-Agent: Scaling Harness Intelligence via Just-in-Time Harness Evolution
- Self-Harness: Harnesses That Improve Themselves
- FineVerify: Scaling Test-Time Compute with Fine-Grained Self-Verification for Agentic Search
- SpreadsheetBench 2: Evaluating Agents on End-to-End Business Spreadsheet Workflows
- Scaling Test-time Compute for LLM Agents
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