Apple 研究：强模型做自主 ML 工程需要多复杂的 harness？
How Much of a Harness Does a Strong Agent Need for Autonomous ML Engineering?
Apple 与 EPFL 的研究发现，在相同时间预算和同一前沿 LLM 骨干下，开源最先进的 MLE agent harness 相比最小 harness 的单会话编码 agent 基线没有优势，性能主要由模型骨干驱动。
AuthorsKirill Brilliantov†‡, Alejandro Hernández-Cano†‡**, Emmanuel Abbé†
Recent autonomous machine learning engineering (MLE) agents have made significant progress on public leaderboards. Often motivated by progress stagnation over long-horizon cycles and limited Large Language Model (LLM) primitives, modern MLE agents are deployed on top of increasingly elaborate machinery: multi-agent orchestrators, dedicated retrieval subagents, and more. While such harnesses expand, the use of more primitive but improved coding agents—where LLMs have direct access to the execution environment through read, write, and bash primitives—has received little attention in the field. In this paper we find that, under an equal time budget and the same frontier LLM backbone, open-source state-of-the-art harnesses provide no advantages over a single session of a minimal-harness coding agent baseline, pointing to the backbone as the primary driver for performance. Via a series of large-scale systematic ablation studies, we argue that the machinery layers become redundant in the coding agent setting. We conclude that the effort spent elaborating hand-crafted harnesses around strong models yields poor returns for current MLE benchmarks.
- † EPFL
- ‡ Equal contribution
- ** Work done while at Apple
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来源：Apple Machine Learning Research（RSS） · machinelearning.apple.com