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HFEPX · Eval paper review

AutoDesign: Meta-Harness Optimization for Long-Horizon Agentic Design

Yaxin Luo, Haobin Jiang, Jialv Zou, Xu Huang +10 more

Published

Aug 13, 2026

Citations

0

Trust level

High

Usefulness score

67/100 (Medium)

Extraction confidence

75% (High)

Derived from extracted protocol signals and abstract evidence.

Rater population

Not reported

Signals refreshed

Aug 13, 2026

Should you rely on this paper?

This paper has useful evaluation signal, but protocol completeness is partial; pair it with related papers before deciding implementation strategy.

Use this as a practical starting point for protocol research, then validate against the original paper.

Best use

Secondary protocol comparison source

Use if you need

A secondary eval reference to pair with stronger protocol papers.

What to verify

Validate the evaluation procedure and quality controls in the full paper before operational use.

Main weakness

No major weakness surfaced.

Human feedback signal
Detected
From extracted signals
Evaluation signal
Detected
Eval setup described
Usefulness for eval research
67/100
Moderate-confidence candidate

Useful as a secondary reference; validate protocol details against neighboring papers.

Abstract

Transforming multimodal sources into condensed and structured media outputs can be fundamentally conceptualized as a long-horizon agentic process centered on a model-harness system. While an ideal harness system should align with human design priors and accumulate reusable experience through empirical exploration to drive recursive self-improvement, existing paradigms remain static and fall short of this capability. In this paper, we present AutoDesign, a framework that aligns with human design priors, where a meta-harness optimizer guides a code agent to recursively improve harness based on rollout feedback. To instantiate and evaluate this framework, we focus on the academic paper-to-poster generation task and introduce PosterBench, comprising a 100-paper Main Track spanning five disciplines and PosterBench-mini, a shared 10-paper subset for controlled evaluation. On the PosterBench Main Track, AutoDesign achieves the highest score of 78.32, surpassing the closed-source commercial system Claude Design by 7.45 points. Across seven controlled code-agent-model configurations, integrating the learned DesignHarness consistently improves performance, increasing the average PosterBench Score from 54.99 to 67.39 (+12.4%). In a fully autonomous long-horizon loop, it executes 253 tool calls and 11 editing turns within 40 minutes for under $3, reaching average conference-poster quality in human evaluation. A system-blind human study further demonstrates that AutoDesign achieves the highest human preference among evaluated systems.

What we could verify

These are the protocol signals we could actually recover from the available paper metadata. Use them to decide whether this paper is worth deeper reading.

Human Feedback Types

strong

Pairwise Preference

Directly usable for protocol triage.

"Transforming multimodal sources into condensed and structured media outputs can be fundamentally conceptualized as a long-horizon agentic process centered on a model-harness system."

Evaluation Modes

strong

Human Eval

Includes extracted eval setup.

"Transforming multimodal sources into condensed and structured media outputs can be fundamentally conceptualized as a long-horizon agentic process centered on a model-harness system."

Quality Controls

missing

Not reported

No explicit QC controls found.

"Transforming multimodal sources into condensed and structured media outputs can be fundamentally conceptualized as a long-horizon agentic process centered on a model-harness system."

Benchmarks / Datasets

strong

Posterbench

Useful for quick benchmark comparison.

"To instantiate and evaluate this framework, we focus on the academic paper-to-poster generation task and introduce PosterBench, comprising a 100-paper Main Track spanning five disciplines and PosterBench-mini, a shared 10-paper subset for controlled evaluation."

Reported Metrics

missing

Not extracted

No metric anchors detected.

"Transforming multimodal sources into condensed and structured media outputs can be fundamentally conceptualized as a long-horizon agentic process centered on a model-harness system."

Benchmarks and datasets

Posterbench

Reported metrics

No metric terms were extracted from the available abstract.

Human feedback details
Uses human feedback
Yes
Feedback types
Pairwise Preference
Rater population
Not reported
Unit of annotation
Scalar
Expertise required
Coding
Evaluation details
Evaluation modes
Human Eval
Agentic eval
Long Horizon
Quality controls
Not reported
Evidence quality
High
Use this page as
Secondary protocol comparison source

Research brief

Metadata summary

Transforming multimodal sources into condensed and structured media outputs can be fundamentally conceptualized as a long-horizon agentic process centered on a model-harness system.

Based on abstract + metadata only. Check the source paper before making high-confidence protocol decisions.

Key takeaways

  • Transforming multimodal sources into condensed and structured media outputs can be fundamentally conceptualized as a long-horizon agentic process centered on a model-harness system.
  • While an ideal harness system should align with human design priors and accumulate reusable experience through empirical exploration to drive recursive self-improvement, existing paradigms remain static and fall short of this capability.
  • In this paper, we present AutoDesign, a framework that aligns with human design priors, where a meta-harness optimizer guides a code agent to recursively improve harness based on rollout feedback.

Researcher actions

  • Compare this paper against nearby papers in the same arXiv category before using it for protocol decisions.
  • Validate inferred eval signals (Human evaluation, Long-horizon tasks) against the full paper.
  • Use related-paper links to find stronger protocol-specific references.

Caveats

  • Generated from abstract + metadata only; no PDF parsing.
  • Signals below are heuristic and may miss details reported outside the abstract.

Contribution summary

  • Transforming multimodal sources into condensed and structured media outputs can be fundamentally conceptualized as a long-horizon agentic process centered on a model-harness system.
  • In this paper, we present AutoDesign, a framework that aligns with human design priors, where a meta-harness optimizer guides a code agent to recursively improve harness based on rollout feedback.
  • Across seven controlled code-agent-model configurations, integrating the learned DesignHarness consistently improves performance, increasing the average PosterBench Score from 54.99 to 67.39 (+12.4%).

Why it matters for eval

  • In this paper, we present AutoDesign, a framework that aligns with human design priors, where a meta-harness optimizer guides a code agent to recursively improve harness based on rollout feedback.
  • Across seven controlled code-agent-model configurations, integrating the learned DesignHarness consistently improves performance, increasing the average PosterBench Score from 54.99 to 67.39 (+12.4%).

Researcher checklist

  • Human feedback protocol is explicit

    Detected: Pairwise Preference

  • Evaluation mode is explicit

    Detected: Human Eval

  • Quality control reporting appears

    No calibration/adjudication/IAA control explicitly detected.

  • Benchmark or dataset anchors are present

    Detected: Posterbench

  • Metric reporting is present

    No metric terms extracted.