Cool stuff. I first worked on ML for exploratory synthesis in 2012, and am still in related areas.

Once you have the experimental loop running, I suspect it will be quite difficult to hill climb on this task.

There will be some improvements you can make to the harness, but I suspect you'll be doing a lot of human in the loop review and providing feedback that goes back into the harness instructions.

I know it's fashionable to imagine automating the whole process, but everything I've seen is that the only systems that succeed are the ones that are augmenting an expert.