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Issue #8 · WeeklyOct 23, 2026

Paper of the Week #8 — Agents Beat All 20 Science Benchmarks, and None of 135 Follow-up Papers Passed

This week's roundup. Agent4Sci reports that frontier agents beat human-verified baselines on all 20 scientific ML benchmarks it collected, mostly through engineering; Into the Unknown reports that none of 135 agent-written follow-up papers met every condition set by the scientists who posed the problems. Also: BizAgentBench, which grades goals and procedure separately on payment-company workflows, and CarryOn, which rebuilds an agent's context from what it has produced instead of its chat history.

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Paper of the Week #8 — Agents Beat All 20 Science Benchmarks, and None of 135 Follow-up Papers Passed

Paper of the Week #8 — Agents Beat All 20 Science Benchmarks, and None of 135 Follow-up Papers Passed

This week's roundup. Agent4Sci reports that frontier agents beat human-verified baselines on all 20 scientific ML benchmarks it collected, mostly through engineering; Into the Unknown reports that none of 135 agent-written follow-up papers met every condition set by the scientists who posed the problems. Also: BizAgentBench, which grades goals and procedure separately on payment-company workflows, and CarryOn, which rebuilds an agent's context from what it has produced instead of its chat history.

- AI Research
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Harness² Selector Code: What It Sees and What It Never Sees

Harness² Selector Code: What It Sees and What It Never Sees

Reading google-research/harness2 (commit 1cfe254): the step that picks one of k harness candidates with no answer key sees only the request, the source material and anonymized, untruncated outputs. A failed pick records the first final by label but is left out of scoring, and when a successful pick leads the reflector to write a lesson, the pick's stated reason is stored verbatim in the library next to the adopted harness.

- Models & Algorithms
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Harness²: A Loop That Edits the Harness Without an Answer Key

Harness²: A Loop That Edits the Harness Without an Answer Key

Harness² (arXiv:2610.14224) makes the harness around a model eight editable parts and recurses on it with no ground truth: 11.5 points on WorkBuddy-Bench from one improvement step (GLM-5 under OpenCode), tested on the OpenCode and Codex substrates, and a selection step, active only above k=1, that the authors admit can pick the weaker candidate. We read the paper and ran the released demo locally.

- Models & Algorithms
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Claude Code, Codex, OpenCode, Hermes: How Many of the Eight Harness Parts Do They Open Up?

Claude Code, Codex, OpenCode, Hermes: How Many of the Eight Harness Parts Do They Open Up?

We compared four agent harnesses (Claude Code, Codex, OpenCode, Hermes Agent) against the eight parts named in the Harness² paper, checking in each tool's official documentation whether a part is exposed as a file or setting, and opening some of the installed tools ourselves. In the docs we read, none of the four opens all eight.

- Models & Algorithms
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What Is an Agent Harness, and What Does Harness Engineering Do?

What Is an Agent Harness, and What Does Harness Engineering Do?

An agent is a model plus a harness: the prompts, rules, memory, tools and scripts around it. Where the term harness engineering comes from, the eight parts Google's Harness² paper edits, and what the practice looks like in a repository you already have.

- Models & Algorithms
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DeepSeek's Config Says 16 KV Heads, Its Cache Holds a Ninth of That: Seven Ways LLMs Handle Attention, and Which Models Use Each

DeepSeek's Config Says 16 KV Heads, Its Cache Holds a Ninth of That: Seven Ways LLMs Handle Attention, and Which Models Use Each

DeepSeek-V2-Lite lists 16 KV heads, which predicts 8,640 MiB of cache at 32K; llama.cpp allocated 972 MiB. A guide to MHA, MQA, GQA, sliding window, MLA, sparse attention and linear-attention hybrids: what each stores, which models use it (checked against their config.json), and what it gives up.

- Models & Algorithms
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