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super interesting new paper from Microsoft "Agent Lightning v1.0: Towards Harnessed Agentic RL" by Zhiyuan He et al.
same idea we've seen already several times: you train the agent inside the real harness it ships with, instead of a reimplementation of it
now that recipe has a name → harnessed agentic RL
paper: huggingface.co/papers/2608.17528
the tricky bit they nail down: one rollout is not one training sample
the harness calls the model many times, so a single episode → a variable number of (prompt, response) rows
you don't even know the batch size until the episode finishes running
its real contribution is being first to systematically map the four problems that fall out of that:
> retokenization + sample merging
> advantage calculation over a variable sample count
> loss normalization at the rollout level, not per sample
> backend scheduling when the batch size is dynamic
and it actually works → plain RL inside the real harness, no reimplementation
Qwen3.5-9B on SWE-bench Verified 41.8 → 56.4 (+14.6), with only ~6k examples
the whole thing is ~3,500 lines, any harness, self-hosted k8s
from our side, we've shared some materials on the same line you may want to check out :)
> Agentic RL: Token-In, Token-Out Done Right: https://huggingface.co/blog/huggingface/tito
> a full worked example, opencode owning its loop trained with GRPO: https://huggingface.co/blog/sergiopaniego/trl-openenv-harness-training
> Harness, Scaffold, and the AI Agent Terms Worth Getting Right: https://huggingface.co/blog/agent-glossary
on a similar line:
https://x.com/SergioPaniego/status/2062911580564496576
same idea we've seen already several times: you train the agent inside the real harness it ships with, instead of a reimplementation of it
now that recipe has a name → harnessed agentic RL
paper: huggingface.co/papers/2608.17528
the tricky bit they nail down: one rollout is not one training sample
the harness calls the model many times, so a single episode → a variable number of (prompt, response) rows
you don't even know the batch size until the episode finishes running
its real contribution is being first to systematically map the four problems that fall out of that:
> retokenization + sample merging
> advantage calculation over a variable sample count
> loss normalization at the rollout level, not per sample
> backend scheduling when the batch size is dynamic
and it actually works → plain RL inside the real harness, no reimplementation
Qwen3.5-9B on SWE-bench Verified 41.8 → 56.4 (+14.6), with only ~6k examples
the whole thing is ~3,500 lines, any harness, self-hosted k8s
from our side, we've shared some materials on the same line you may want to check out :)
> Agentic RL: Token-In, Token-Out Done Right: https://huggingface.co/blog/huggingface/tito
> a full worked example, opencode owning its loop trained with GRPO: https://huggingface.co/blog/sergiopaniego/trl-openenv-harness-training
> Harness, Scaffold, and the AI Agent Terms Worth Getting Right: https://huggingface.co/blog/agent-glossary
on a similar line:
https://x.com/SergioPaniego/status/2062911580564496576
