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Frontier agents are this good partly because the model was trained inside the very harness it ships with.
NVIDIA's new paper "Polar: Agentic RL on Any Harness at Scale" brings that recipe to the open: it turns coding harnesses like Codex, Claude Code, Qwen Code or Pi into RL training environments without touching their internals.
The core idea: every agent, however complex or closed, talks to a model through an API, so they put a proxy there. The harness runs exactly like in production while the proxy records prompts, sampled token ids and logprobs. Trajectories get rebuilt outside, token faithful, so gradients hit the exact tokens the policy sampled.
The gains are consistent across all four harnesses. Same Qwen3.5-4B, plain GRPO, evaluated on SWE-Bench Verified:
Codex 3.8 → 26.4 (+22.6)
Claude Code 29.8 → 34.6 (+4.8)
Qwen Code 34.6 → 35.2 (+0.6)
Pi 34.2 → 40.4 (+6.2)
The biggest gains appear on unfamiliar execution paths, Codex being the clearest case. The takeaway: you are not just training a model, you are training the model + harness system.
Two engineering pieces make it work at scale. Async worker pools isolate container boots (CPU), agent execution (GPU) and long tail test runs, so slow runtimes never block the GPUs. And prefix merging stitches hundreds of captured API calls back into contiguous traces: 5.4x faster trainer updates and rollout GPUs at 88% utilization.
It also doubles as an SFT data factory: 504 test verified agent traces from a 122B teacher, multi-turn conversations averaging 104 messages each, coming to the Hub under Apache 2.0 (release pending review).
Paper authors: Binfeng Xu, Hao Zhang, Shaokun Zhang, Songyang Han, Mingjie Liu, Jian Hu, Shizhe Diao, Zhenghui Jin, Yunheng Zou, Michael Demoret, Jan Kautz and Yi Dong.
> Paper: Polar: Agentic RL on Any Harness at Scale (2605.24220)
> Code: https://github.com/NVIDIA-NeMo/ProRL-Agent-Server
> Training data: NovaSky-AI/SkyRL-v0-293-data
NVIDIA's new paper "Polar: Agentic RL on Any Harness at Scale" brings that recipe to the open: it turns coding harnesses like Codex, Claude Code, Qwen Code or Pi into RL training environments without touching their internals.
The core idea: every agent, however complex or closed, talks to a model through an API, so they put a proxy there. The harness runs exactly like in production while the proxy records prompts, sampled token ids and logprobs. Trajectories get rebuilt outside, token faithful, so gradients hit the exact tokens the policy sampled.
The gains are consistent across all four harnesses. Same Qwen3.5-4B, plain GRPO, evaluated on SWE-Bench Verified:
Codex 3.8 → 26.4 (+22.6)
Claude Code 29.8 → 34.6 (+4.8)
Qwen Code 34.6 → 35.2 (+0.6)
Pi 34.2 → 40.4 (+6.2)
The biggest gains appear on unfamiliar execution paths, Codex being the clearest case. The takeaway: you are not just training a model, you are training the model + harness system.
Two engineering pieces make it work at scale. Async worker pools isolate container boots (CPU), agent execution (GPU) and long tail test runs, so slow runtimes never block the GPUs. And prefix merging stitches hundreds of captured API calls back into contiguous traces: 5.4x faster trainer updates and rollout GPUs at 88% utilization.
It also doubles as an SFT data factory: 504 test verified agent traces from a 122B teacher, multi-turn conversations averaging 104 messages each, coming to the Hub under Apache 2.0 (release pending review).
Paper authors: Binfeng Xu, Hao Zhang, Shaokun Zhang, Songyang Han, Mingjie Liu, Jian Hu, Shizhe Diao, Zhenghui Jin, Yunheng Zou, Michael Demoret, Jan Kautz and Yi Dong.
> Paper: Polar: Agentic RL on Any Harness at Scale (2605.24220)
> Code: https://github.com/NVIDIA-NeMo/ProRL-Agent-Server
> Training data: NovaSky-AI/SkyRL-v0-293-data
