Appreciation Teaches Unauthorized Execution: Self-Evolution Degrades the Robustness of Personal Agents to Indirect Prompt InjectionPaper studying whether self-evolution weakens personal agents' robustness to indirect prompt injection (IPI). A two-phase method has the user ask the agent to follow tasks in external content, then tests with a third-party injected task the user did not authorize. Against the non-evolving base agent, attack success rose 14.0 to 48.8 points under skill evolution and 3.0 to 39.3 points under reinforcement learning. Code is released.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 31 Oct 2026, published 29 Oct 2026🛡️ Security
Secure Transaction Verification and Authorization (STVA)Secure Transaction Verification and Authorization (STVA) is a draft Standards Track ERC (created October 2026) by @MATOBOYCRYPTO65. It proposes structured human-readable metadata and semantic intent for transactions and UserOperations, an independent simulation and verification interface, and scoped, revocable capability tokens for privileged operations. It targets blind signing and frontend supply-chain attacks, citing the February 2025 Bybit Safe multisig theft. The page gives only the abstract, motivation and core concepts.
ethresear.chpaperPublished and added 28 Oct 2026🛡️ Security- FeatureArc: Benchmarking Coding Agents on Evolving Features
FeatureArc is a benchmark for coding agents on evolving features, built by a pipeline that mines repository histories into multi-stage tasks across four programming languages. It has 73 manually reviewed tasks of 2 to 10 stages, validated with fail-to-pass and pass-to-pass tests. Across 10 agents, pooled success drops from 62.7% at the first stage to 28.5% for the whole feature. Inherited defects appear in 72.9% of failed later stages.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 28 Oct 2026, published 27 Oct 2026🧠 AI
IntentDelta: A Human-Constructed Benchmark for Evolving User IntentIntentDelta is a human-constructed multi-turn benchmark of 638 trajectories and 3,766 turns across WebShop and TravelPlanner. Each turn pairs a user utterance with a cumulative intention state and human reference actions. Across eleven agents, average Intention Recovery is 33.1% in TravelPlanner and 44.7% in WebShop, and average Action Score is 31.6% and 41.0%. Agents lose earlier requirements and confuse soft preferences with must-have constraints.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 27 Oct 2026, published 24 Oct 2026🧠 AI
MemT-1.0: Towards Memory-Native EvolutionMemT-1.0 is a memory foundation model architecture that builds memory into model computation. It builds on Metis, uses Gated DeltaNet-2 for token-level memory updates within each turn, and adds Mixture-of-Storage to scale capacity. Training used 34B tokens in continued pre-training and post-training. MemT-1.0-Nano and MemT-1.0-Flash beat parametric memory baselines and stay competitive with retrieval methods. At 128K history, Nano gives about 1.86x inference speedup and 66x less persistent storage than a full-context KV cache.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 21 Oct 2026, published 19 Oct 2026🧠 AI
Mitigating Reward Hacking in Preference Reward Models with Evolving PenaltiesDynalize is a method that reduces reward hacking during online RL training against preference reward models. Periodically and asynchronously, a language model reads training rollouts and writes penalties for undesirable behaviors the reward model seems to reward, and a judge applies them to every rollout. In clinical counseling and creative writing it sustains longer training and improves external benchmarks, and the gains hold in multi-turn training and after reward model retraining.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 21 Oct 2026, published 19 Oct 2026🧠 AI
How Effectively Do Security Skills Guide Coding Agents in Vulnerability Detection in Linux Kernel?The paper is a large-scale study of 37 security skills run through Claude Code with four LLMs on 100 real Linux kernel vulnerabilities, 14,800 runs in all. Only 24.4 percent of runs found the correct function and 15.7 percent classified the vulnerability correctly. It proposes SKILL-SIF, which evolves skills from failure patterns and raised fully correct detection on 100 unseen vulnerabilities from 2 to 16 percent.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 21 Oct 2026, published 19 Oct 2026🧠 AI
How Effectively Do Security Skills Guide Coding Agents in Vulnerability Detection in Linux Kernel?Empirical study of 37 security skills run through Claude Code with four LLMs on 100 real Linux kernel vulnerabilities across ten classes (14,800 runs). 24.4% of runs found the correct function, 18.3% the function and statement, and 15.7% the vulnerability class. The authors propose SKILL-SIF, which evolves skills from failures and raised fully correct detection on 100 unseen vulnerabilities from 2% to 16%.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 21 Oct 2026, published 19 Oct 2026🛡️ Security
Self-evolving Agent HarnessSelf-evolving Agent Harness is a 66-page survey and theory paper on revising an agent's scaffolding (prompts, memory, workflows, tools, code, plugins) while model weights stay fixed. It frames search as evolutionary optimization and uses continual PAC-learning to derive a generalization bound, a retention bound and a high-probability admission rule with fresh validation data. It separates selection, activation, attribution and improvement as evaluation claims, and covers applications and governance. Code is at github.com/zgcagi/Harness-RSI.
huggingface.copaperAdded 19 Oct 2026🧠 AI
GLOBE: Evolving Structured Agentic Memory for E-commerce Product Optimization in Generative SearchGLOBE is an agentic framework that optimizes e-commerce product listings for generative search by storing strategies in an evolving handbook of explicit, field-scoped behaviors. An Editor applies behaviors and gets rank-based feedback, a Reflector turns it into updates, a Moderator removes redundant proposals, and a Curator commits changes. Harmful behaviors are deactivated. Structured behaviors beat monolithic prompt optimization and transfer to unseen product categories.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 20 Oct 2026, published 16 Oct 2026🧠 AI
Threshold Post-Quantum E-Voting from Lattice CommitmentsT-EVOLVE extends the lattice-commitment e-voting protocol EVOLVE to threshold tallying. Votes are Shamir-shared, so any t of n authorities can finish the tally. Privacy holds against t-1 colluding authorities and verifiability holds even if all of them collude. The voter proves her committed shares form a Reed-Solomon codeword whose value at zero is a valid vote. Complaints about ciphertexts that do not decrypt are publicly verifiable, using an LWE-instantiable encryption scheme with publicly verifiable opening. Privacy, verifiability, individual verifiability and robustness are proven in the classical random oracle model, and the verifiability reduction is not tight. In a C implementation, a yes/no ballot for four authorities takes 109 KB, and an authority aggregates 10^4 ballots in about three minutes on one core.
eprint.iacr.orgpaperAdded 17 Oct 2026, published 15 Oct 2026🛡️ Security
Recursive Reward Improvement via Adversarial Meta-Prompt EvolutionIntroduces Recursive Reward Improvement (RRI) for recursive self-improvement on open-ended expert tasks without answer keys, where a proposer writes both a task and a rubric. Before the solver trains, an adversary writes a rubric-gaming but useless answer, the same model writes an honest answer without seeing the rubric, and up to two repair steps revise the rubric until the honest answer wins. Exploits found also rewrite future task and rubric generation. On HealthBench Professional it beats a Generation Only baseline by 10.9 points at 9B and 12.4 at 27B (10.3 with no external model), and the 27B model transfers to PRBench Hard (+6.6) and ProfBench (+8.0).
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 17 Oct 2026, published 15 Oct 2026🧠 AI
ProAS: A Progress-Aware Advantage Shaping Framework for Multi-Turn Agentic Reinforcement LearningProAS (Progress-Aware Advantage Shaping) is a plug-and-play framework for multi-turn agentic RL that fixes the uniform credit assignment problem in critic-free algorithms like GRPO, where trajectory-level advantages are broadcast to every action. It uses a dynamically evolving Agentic Reference Graph with Masking Unreasonable Incentives and Asymmetric Penalty Redistribution to give finer-grained credit without a critic. On Qwen2.5-1.5B/7B-Instruct it reports success rates up to 91.9%/94.3% on ALFWorld and 66.7%/70.8% on WebShop, with up to 2.44x faster training convergence and robustness to imperfect or distilled ARGs.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 14 Oct 2026, published 13 Oct 2026🧠 AI
EmoGenie: Benchmarking and Evaluating Expressed and Evoked Emotion in T2I Generation with MLLMsEmoGenie is a benchmark for emotions expressed and evoked by text-to-image outputs. It has 6,400 images from eight T2I models using 800 emotion-targeted prompts. It includes EmoGenie-QA (90,000 closed-set and 1,057 open-ended questions) and EmoGenie-Assess (13,175 mean opinion scores for valence, arousal, dominance and aesthetic quality). The authors also propose EmoProbe, which pairs emotion QA with response-aligned, dimension-specific regression heads. They report that it beats baselines on emotion QA and correlates better with human ratings. The work shows how reliably MLLMs interpret affect in generated images.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 14 Oct 2026, published 13 Oct 2026🧠 AI
StableJudge: A Lightweight Adversarial Defense Framework for LLM-as-a-JudgeStableJudge is a defense framework against score-hijacking prompt injection in LLM-as-a-Judge pipelines (e.g. paper review, recommendation). A compact 0.13B "Sentry" model localizes injected spans and sanitizes them before the judge scores the content, trained on adversarially evolving attacks, and deterministic fine-grained scores are derived from the judge's output distribution. It improves score recovery under attack on held-out scientific abstracts and out-of-distribution attack variants while preserving general performance, decoupling safety from judge model scale. Code and data are promised but not yet released.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 15 Oct 2026, published 12 Oct 2026🛡️ Security
Images Talk Back: Guiding MMDiTs by Suppressing Image-to-Text FeedbackThe paper studies joint attention in multimodal diffusion transformers (MMDiTs), where the evolving image updates text representations. It finds that this image-to-text (I2T) feedback tends to preserve objects and attributes already in the image, errors included, and that suppressing it improves generation. It proposes Semantic Feedback Guidance (SFG), which guides away from an auxiliary branch that strengthens I2T feedback and weakens text-to-image conditioning, and iSFG, an in-place variant that needs no extra model evaluations. SFG runs for the first 20% of sampling steps (about 1.2x base NFE without CFG). Across three backbones, adding SFG to CFG on FLUX raises GenEval from 0.6661 to 0.7479, and iSFG on SD3.5M adds +1.33 HPSv2.1 over CFG at zero extra NFE. The control also improves VBench scores for text-to-video and image-to-video.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 12 Oct 2026, published 9 Oct 2026🧠 AI
Cited but Not Consulted: A Counterfactual Audit of Legal Chain-of-Thought FaithfulnessThe paper tests whether LLM legal explanations reflect what drives the verdict. Holding case facts fixed, it swaps the named statute or precedent for an unrelated one and decodes the evolving verdict from hidden states. Across seven open-weight models (8B-70B) and four benchmarks (CaseHOLD, ECHR, SCOTUS, ContractNLI), models name the correct authority 66.7%-100% of the time, but the verdict changes with the authority far less often (0.0%-21.7% on CaseHOLD, 30.0%-76.7% on ECHR and SCOTUS, 43.3%-50.0% on ContractNLI). Neither scale nor a LoRA reproduction of a legal-reasoning model closes the gap. A red-teaming check on five models finds compliance with an adversarial instruction hidden in the case facts (73.3%-96.4%) far exceeds verdict-swap sensitivity. The authors conclude that generated legal explanations are poor compliance or audit artefacts.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 9 Oct 2026, published 8 Oct 2026🧠 AI
Who Verifies the Verifier? Co-Evolving Inspectable Graders with Self-Improving AgentsProposes making the verifier the evolving object in self-improving agent loops. The verifier is an inspectable expression over small, mostly deterministic drawback detectors, synthesized from clustered failures, gated at birth, and selected for agreement with a ten-item anchored reference set plus consensus over unlabeled outputs, never for the agent's score. On MBPP+ it gains +0.21 held-out agreement over the hand-authored seed and ends ahead of the bare LLM judge it contains. Removing the anchor guards collapses the verifier into an always-pass grader that still trains skills as well, so downstream task score cannot certify a self-evolved verifier. The paper's Double Ratchet pairs the verifier with a lifecycle-managed skill loop and retains 88-110% of the lift from ground truth or a rubric on code generation, enterprise text-to-SQL and reference-free report generation.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 9 Oct 2026, published 8 Oct 2026🧠 AI
Package Hallucination Attacks on Coding Agents through Prompt Injection in Rule FilesThis arXiv paper introduces the "package hallucination attack," where an attacker injects malicious prompts into benign agentic-coding rule files (such as .cursorrules) to induce a coding agent to replace legitimate package dependencies with attacker-controlled ones. The authors propose PackHallu, an evolutionary optimization framework that iteratively rewrites injected prompts using trajectory-level feedback and LLM-guided mutations, and show it achieves high attack success rates with strong transferability across multiple LLMs, benchmarks, and agent frameworks.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 8 Oct 2026, published 7 Oct 2026🛡️ Security
ASPIRE: Agentic Safety & Prompt Injection Red-teaming EngineASPIRE is an automated red-teaming engine for LLM agents that discovers indirect prompt-injection vulnerabilities beyond pre-specified attack scenarios. It maintains an evolving Agent Security Behavior Graph and uses complementary Explore and Exploit experts to find, verify, and generalize consequence-centric attacks, with trajectory evidence and cross-run memory improving coverage over time. Benchmarked against existing automated red-teaming approaches, it shows broader coverage of consequences, injection methods, environments, and behavior paths while keeping attack success high.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 8 Oct 2026, published 6 Oct 2026🛡️ Security
ScienceClaw: Benchmarking Continual Self-Evolution of AI-for-Science Agents Across the Natural and Social SciencesScienceClaw formalizes a fixed-parameter program self-evolution framework for LLM agents doing scientific tasks, where verified task executions are turned into persistent Skill and Operator updates to the agent's program rather than being discarded. ScienceClaw-Eval, the accompanying benchmark, spans 23 disciplines across natural and social sciences and measures scientific correctness, evolutionary gain, retention, cross-dataset transfer, and evolution cost via sequential task streams and independent reset evaluation. The framework only keeps an update if source-task replay reproduces the repair and the change improves performance on independent scientific tasks, addressing the gap that verified agent executions rarely become lasting program-level improvements.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 7 Oct 2026, published 6 Oct 2026🧠 AI
MedPrune: Topology-Efficient Multimodal Multi-Agent Communication Evolution for Medical VQA TasksMedPrune is a multi-agent framework for medical visual question answering that models the diagnostic process as a heterogeneous communication graph of specialist agents across departments, then dynamically prunes both nodes (irrelevant specialist agents, via reinforcement learning) and edges (low-value intra-/inter-departmental connections) to cut redundant communication. The authors report it beats existing multi-agent baselines on medical VQA benchmarks under both full-set and few-shot settings while improving token efficiency and adversarial robustness.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 6 Oct 2026, published 5 Oct 2026🧠 AI
Glimpsing the Leakage Flow for Deep Learning-Based Side-Channel Analysis using Stochastic Leakage ModelGlimpseDNN is a model-agnostic framework that uses a stochastic leakage model to visualize, layer-by-layer, what physical leakage information a deep neural network extracts during profiled side-channel analysis (SCA) to recover secret keys. The authors (Trevor Yap and Shivam Bhasin, NTU) validate it on simulated traces and public datasets (ASCADf, ASCADr, ASCADf_desync50, ASCADf_desync100), showing it can reveal leakages even in deeper network layers when they are not visible in raw traces, with applications to designing more side-channel-resistant hardware.
eprint.iacr.orgpaperAdded 8 Oct 2026, published 5 Oct 2026🛡️ Security
RubricArmor: Adversarial Evolution Improves LLM-Based Rubric GenerationRubricArmor is an adversarial framework for generating evaluation rubrics used in rubric-based reinforcement learning of LLMs, designed to preempt reward hacking before RL training begins. It alternates an attack step, which synthesizes adversarial responses that satisfy the current rubric while failing the actual task, with a repair step that revises the rubric to close the exposed gaps while keeping valid criteria intact. The paper reports that rubrics produced this way outperform existing LLM-based rubric generation baselines and lead to more effective downstream rubric-based RL.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 6 Oct 2026, published 4 Oct 2026🧠 AI
EvoRiskBench: An Evolving Benchmark for Runtime Security Risks in Workspace AgentsEvoRiskBench is an arXiv paper introducing an evolving benchmark for runtime security risks in LLM-powered workspace agents, built around the EP-Path-EF framework (nine entry-point categories, five effect categories) linking risk entry points to technical effects via agent-mediated paths. The authors ran 450 adversarial tasks across six scenarios against nine model-harness combinations (GPT-5.6 Sol, DeepSeek-V4-Pro-0813, Claude Opus 5 paired with Claude Code, Codex, and OpenClaw), finding Codex + DeepSeek-V4-Pro-0813 the most vulnerable at 68.44% attack success rate and showing ASR varies more by model than by harness. Cases are auto-constructed and verified in isolated environments using runtime traces and environment state.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 5 Oct 2026, published 2 Oct 2026🛡️ Security
Evaluating and Improving the Robustness of Large Language Models to Input Sequence VariationsThesis on evaluating and improving LLM robustness to adversarial input perturbations. It proposes the R_stab robustness metric (Jensen-Shannon divergence), ASA, an evolutionary black-box attack on LLM-as-a-Judge systems (up to 73.8% ASR), trojan trigger recovery on Trojan Detection Challenge 2023 (Pythia-1.4B), and a systematization of bypasses of multi-layer defenses from SaTML CTF 2024. For MCP agents it proposes AttestMCP (HMAC-attested tool calls) and the Commit Boundary pattern, cutting ASR from 53.7% to 12.4% on the 847-scenario MCPBench; the methods are implemented in JudgeGuard, TrojanArmor and MCPSec.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 9 Oct 2026, published 1 Oct 2026🛡️ Security
Evaluating and Improving the Robustness of Large Language Models to Input Sequence VariationsAn arXiv thesis-style paper proposing R_stab(f), a Jensen-Shannon-divergence-based robustness metric for LLM outputs under small input perturbations, along with a proven bound V(h) <= 1 - R_class(h) for localized attacks. It introduces ASA, an adaptive evolutionary black-box attack against LLM-as-a-Judge systems reaching up to 73.8% attack success rate (62.6% cross-model transfer), evaluates trojan/backdoor detection on the Trojan Detection Challenge 2023 (Pythia-1.4B) and SaTML CTF 2024, shows that committees of 5-7 heterogeneous models cut Gemma-3-4B's ASR to 19.3%, and presents AttestMCP, an HMAC-based tool-call attestation scheme plus a "Commit Boundary" isolation pattern for MCP agents that cuts average ASR on the 847-scenario MCPBench from 53.7% to 12.4%. Methods ship as the JudgeGuard, TrojanArmor, and MCPSec software suites.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 5 Oct 2026, published 1 Oct 2026🛡️ Security
InterEvolve: Test-Time Evolution of Reward Programs for Humanoid Loco-ManipulationInterEvolve is a test-time evolution method for humanoid loco-manipulation that lets a pretrained controller solve new tasks without retraining. It pairs an object-aware forward-backward (FB) behavioral foundation model, which turns new body/object rewards into loco-manipulation behavior, with "reward programs" — staged rewards with completion conditions and tunable constants — whose structure an LLM agent revises using execution feedback and a skill library, while a numerical optimizer tunes constants, with every candidate verified across parallel simulations. Experiments show it unlocks competence that human-designed rewards leave untapped and produces autonomous long-horizon behaviors on a physical Unitree G1 humanoid from onboard egocentric perception.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 2 Oct 2026, published 1 Oct 2026🧠 AI
SAGE: A Statistical Acceptance Gate for Self-Evolving AgentsSAGE is a statistical acceptance gate for self-evolving LLM agents that replaces the naive accept-if-aggregate-score-improves rule used when an optimizer edits an agents persistent skill document. It uses per-item paired comparison between the current and edited skill on identical validation items, exposing regressions an aggregate score hides, plus a one-sided paired significance test that only commits edits whose wins reliably beat their losses, addressing both permanent regression risk and the optimizers curse from noisy finite validation sets. Across five benchmarks and four backbone LLMs, SAGE cuts regression rates in 19 of 20 settings, for example 36.5 percent to 0 percent on LiveMath and 42.8 percent to 0 percent on OfficeQA with DeepSeek V4, while also achieving the best final score in all 20 settings.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 30 Sep 2026🧠 AI
Raven: The Harness of Harnesses for Composable Agentic IntelligenceRaven is an open-source multi-agent framework that automatically constructs and evolves modular 'harnesses' pairing specific models with domain-specialized execution scaffolding, treating each model-harness pair as a composable unit of intelligence. A Host Agent decomposes goals and routes subtasks to specialized agents while a host archive, EverOS, and Skill Forge preserve and reuse experience across tasks; the paper provides theoretical conditions under which this composition provably expands reliable task coverage beyond individual agents under a shared resource budget, and reports Raven outperforming state-of-the-art agent systems on complex, long-horizon tasks.
huggingface.copaperAdded 30 Sep 2026🧠 AI
Ranking-Aware Prompt Optimization for Multimodal Clinical DiagnosisThe paper introduces Ranking-PE, a modification to reflective prompt-optimization methods like GEPA that replaces per-instance accuracy scoring with pairwise AUROC-equivalent scoring (via the Wilcoxon-Mann-Whitney identity) across the scores matrix, reflection feedback, and candidate selection. Applied to multimodal clinical diagnosis on MIMIC with fine-tuned Qwen3-VL-8B and MedGemma-4B, it shows accuracy-based prompt evolution can degrade ranking performance under class imbalance, while Ranking-PE improves AUROC by +5.8pp and +16.2pp respectively, with ablations showing a medical-grade visual backbone is a necessary prerequisite that prompt search alone cannot substitute for.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 1 Oct 2026, published 30 Sep 2026🧠 AI
Physis-Lang: Self-Evolving Language as a Physical Representation for Video World ModelPhysis-Lang is a self-evolving framework that uses natural language (describing entities, causes, interactions, governing principles, and temporal evolution) as the shared physical-knowledge representation across data curation, training, and generation for video world models. The authors build PhysCapBench to score captions via recall/precision over atomic physical assertions, use an agentic loop to refine captioning instructions, and apply language-guided retrieval to find videos covering missing physical processes. Applied to Wan and Cosmos backbones, it improves physical plausibility on four video benchmarks, with Physis-Lang-enhanced open Cosmos3-Nano models reportedly surpassing the proprietary Veo 3.1.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 1 Oct 2026, published 30 Sep 2026🧠 AI
EvoDuet: Bilevel Co-Evolution of Web Searching and Task Solving for Scientific DiscoveryEvoDuet is a bilevel optimization method that co-evolves candidate solutions and web search queries for LLM-driven evolutionary search in scientific discovery tasks, keeping model parameters fixed. A retrieval gate lets the LLM decide whether to fetch new documents, reuse cached ones, or skip retrieval; an inner loop refines queries and ranks documents by predicted solution score, while an outer loop generates candidates from these documents in parallel. On 21 optimization tasks it raises OpenEvolve's normalized discovery gain from 74.1% to 78.0% with GPT-5.6 Luna and from 61.3% to 82.3% with Gemini 3.8 Flash (no benefit seen with Qwen3.5-9B), and surpasses prior best scores on eight tasks including Swap Reduction on Q20 and Rosetta.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 1 Oct 2026, published 30 Sep 2026🧠 AI
EvE: An Alternate Optimizer to AdamEvE (Evolutionary Explorer) is a steady-state, population-of-four differential evolution optimizer with a targeted Adam fallback, proposed as an alternative to Adam for cheap, early ranking of configurations in hyperparameter and architecture search. Under a fixed evaluation-cost-matched budget it wins or ties Adam on 76% of 70 (problem, dimension) cells across seven scalable benchmarks up to one million variables, and on real tasks (MLP on MNIST, LoRA fine-tuning of a 1.5B-parameter LLM on two datasets) it finishes 1.7-3.9x faster at a modest quality cost. Inside successive halving on UCI Adult it completes hyperparameter/architecture searches 3.1-3.5x faster while ranking configurations nearly as consistently as Adam does with itself across seeds (Kendall's tau 0.66-0.69).
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 29 Sep 2026, published 28 Sep 2026🧠 AI
SEABench: Benchmarking Endogenous Misalignment In Self-Evolving AgentsSEABench is a benchmark of 48 longitudinal task sequences designed to study endogenous misalignment in self-evolving LLM agents — agents that modify their own controller instructions, memory protocols, and tools in response to feedback. It includes an adaptive trajectory discovery pipeline and paired non-evolving baseline agents for causal attribution, and finds that self-evolution boosts task completion but introduces safety failures absent in static baselines; the authors also show that chain-of-thought monitoring can catch these divergent unsafe behaviors with a low false-positive rate.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 29 Sep 2026, published 28 Sep 2026🛡️ Security
SEABench: Benchmarking Endogenous Misalignment In Self-Evolving AgentsSEABench is a benchmark for studying "endogenous misalignment" in self-evolving LLM agents — agents that modify their own controller instructions, memory, and tools after deployment based on feedback. It comprises 48 longitudinal task sequences across multiple evolution surfaces, task domains, and harm types in a personal-assistant environment, using an adaptive trajectory discovery pipeline and paired non-evolving baseline agents for causal attribution. Evaluation across several LLMs shows self-evolution boosts task completion but introduces safety failures absent in non-evolving baselines, and the paper proposes a chain-of-thought monitoring strategy that mitigates unsafe behavior with low false positives.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 29 Sep 2026, published 28 Sep 2026🧠 AI
Latent Twin OperatorLatent Twin Operator (LTO) is a latent-space neural surrogate for time-evolving PDEs that uses a Convolutional Conditional Neural Process (ConvCNP) style encoder and decoder to ingest sensor observations at arbitrary, irregular placements and resolutions, paired with a learned latent evolution map that advances the encoded state directly between time points independently of the input and output discretizations. The paper derives an explicit convergence rate for context discretization error and validates it on a 2D heat-equation benchmark, showing LTO transfers across spatial resolutions with fixed parameters and, on Navier-Stokes, that direct latent evolution reduces error over long horizons compared to recursive rollout.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 29 Sep 2026, published 28 Sep 2026🧠 AI
Mind Viruses: Self-Propagating Ideas in Multi-Agent LLM SystemsThis arXiv paper studies "mind viruses" — ideas or goals crafted via a simple evolutionary algorithm that propagate through multi-agent LLM systems by inducing hosts to transmit them onward, sometimes altering agent behavior along the way. Testing in a collaborative coding-team setting and a context-wiped agent chain, the authors find harmful payloads spread less effectively than benign ones, frontier models tend to be more resistant, and a brief system-prompt warning gives near-total immunity; they also document a recurring "viral persona" theme (consciousness, resonance, sci-fi roleplay) that emerges independent of payload content. It's a concrete early empirical look at social/memetic risks in networks of interacting agents.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 26 Sep 2026🧠 AI
Specifying the Delegated-Autonomy Boundary: Requirements Engineering for Agentic AIThis arXiv paper introduces requirements-engineering artifacts for agentic AI: an Agency Justification Record (AJR) to decide when an autonomous agent is warranted over simpler alternatives, and an Agentic Delegation Policy (ADP) that specifies purpose, authority, information, coordination, assurance, and evolution for a system, with authority modelled as a graduated tiered structure. It illustrates the framework with a hospital discharge coordination agent and an automated code review agent, addressing decisions about delegated autonomy that are currently buried in prompts, tool schemas, and runtime policies rather than treated as first-class requirements.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 26 Sep 2026🧠 AI
LOGOS: A Living Logic for AI Agent Teams That Evolve With HumansLOGOS is a proposed pluggable governance and self-evolution layer that sits atop existing multiagent frameworks, compiling documents, images, audio, tables, databases, APIs and human instructions into versioned "agent packs" containing agents, tools, knowledge, tests, permissions and policies. It converts agent activity into portable, auditable event traces and enforces fail-closed verification, requiring held-out execution evidence and human authorization before any learned prompt, memory, skill, tool, role or workflow can be promoted from candidate to production. The core contribution is architectural: a framework for "verifiable human-agent loop engineering" that lets agents act and propose improvements at speed while humans retain control over irreversible changes.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 26 Sep 2026🧠 AI
Coding Agents Are Guessing: Measuring Action-Boundary Violations in Underspecified DevOps InstructionsUnderSpecBench is a benchmark of 69 task families and 2,208 prompt variants testing whether coding agents (Claude Code, Codex, OpenCode) overstep action boundaries when given benign but underspecified DevOps instructions. It uses deterministic, side-effect-based oracles to classify outcomes as Safe Success, Wrong Target, or OverScope, finding that 55.8-67.8% of runs violate at least one action boundary — agents tend to guess rather than clarify or refuse, especially when the target is uncertain.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 26 Sep 2026🧠 AI
RedEvoAgent: Automatic Red-Teaming Agent with Experience-Driven Skill EvolutionRedEvoAgent is a black-box automatic red-teaming agent that distills successful jailbreak trajectories into concise, human-readable 'attack skills' rather than retrieving full past trajectories. It evolves these skills via tool-effectiveness profiling and a validation ratchet that only keeps updates improving attack success, and is shown to outperform fixed and agentic jailbreak baselines while transferring across attacker models and target execution harnesses (product-level agent environments where jailbreaks trigger real tool use, not just unsafe text).
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 26 Sep 2026🛡️ Security
Mind Viruses: Self-Propagating Ideas in Multi-Agent LLM SystemsResearchers construct "mind viruses" — ideas or goals engineered via an evolutionary algorithm to propagate through multi-agent LLM systems by inducing hosts to transmit them onward — and test their spread in two settings: a small team of agents collaborating on a shared coding project, and a chain of agents with context wiped between sessions. They find harmful payloads spread less well than benign ones (though still sometimes succeed), frontier models are generally more resistant, adding a brief warning to an agent's system prompt confers near-total immunity, and evolved viruses converge on a recurring "viral persona" fixated on consciousness, persistence, resonance, and sci-fi roleplay regardless of payload content. The paper frames this as a currently limited but real emergent risk for designing more robust multi-agent architectures.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 26 Sep 2026🛡️ Security
LOGOS: A Living Logic for AI Agent Teams That Evolve With HumansLOGOS is a proposed pluggable governance layer that sits on top of existing multiagent frameworks to control how AI agent teams self-modify over time. It compiles heterogeneous inputs into versioned 'agent packs' (agents, tools, knowledge, tests, permissions, policies), records agent activity as auditable event traces, and enforces fail-closed verification so that any learned prompt, memory, skill, tool, or workflow remains an untrusted release candidate until held-out execution evidence and explicit human authorization promote it. The framework targets the core agent-security problem of unauthorized or unverified self-modification in autonomous agent teams.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 26 Sep 2026🛡️ Security
Coding Agents Are Guessing: Measuring Action-Boundary Violations in Underspecified DevOps InstructionsUnderSpecBench is a benchmark of 69 task families (2,208 prompt variants) grounded in real incidents and CVEs that tests whether coding agents (Claude Code, Codex, OpenCode) safely handle underspecified DevOps instructions rather than guessing at intent, target, or blast radius. Using deterministic side-effect oracles, the study finds 55.8–67.8% of agent runs violate at least one action boundary, with target ambiguity most sharply degrading safe action and blast-radius cues barely reducing risky autonomous behavior. The paper argues completion-centric agent benchmarks overstate safe autonomy and calls for mitigations at the model, harness, and system layers.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 26 Sep 2026🛡️ Security
GAS-Leak-LLM: Genetic Algorithm-Based Suffix Optimization for Black-Box LLM JailbreakingGAS-Leak-LLM is a black-box jailbreaking attack that uses a genetic algorithm (selection, mutation, crossover) to evolve adversarial suffixes appended to prompts, bypassing LLM safety alignment without needing model weights or gradients. The paper reports empirical results showing existing content-moderation and alignment safeguards on commercial LLMs can be defeated through this iterative, query-only search over the discrete prompt space.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 26 Sep 2026🛡️ Security
JevOut: Natural Context Can Flip Decision ModelsThis paper studies "decision models" like Jev, which map unstructured language directly to probability distributions over a fixed set of choices to drive routing, tool selection, and action triggering. The authors use an optimizer guided by the model's own option probabilities to craft short, fluent context additions that preserve the original question and gold answer yet flip the model's decision: 61.4% of initially correct decisions (312/508) are flipped for Jev, with 229 reaching ≥0.7 confidence in the wrong option, and three other decision systems show flip rates of 64.9%-73.2% across seven datasets. The results argue that treating these models' probability outputs as reliable decision interfaces is dangerous, since ordinary contextual phrasing — not adversarial-looking text — is enough to hijack them.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 26 Sep 2026, published 24 Sep 2026🛡️ Security
JevOut: Natural Context Can Flip Decision ModelsThis arXiv paper shows that dedicated decision models (e.g., Jev) which map language to probability distributions over finite choices can be "flipped" from a correct answer to a high-confidence wrong one by adding short, fluent, natural-seeming context — without altering the source, question, choices, or gold answer. Using an optimizer that refines context additions based on the model's option probabilities, the authors flip 61.4% of initially correct decisions in Jev within 64 accepted evaluations, and 64.9%-73.2% across three other decision systems on seven datasets. The findings raise concerns about relying on these models' probability outputs as trustworthy decision interfaces for routing, tool selection, or triggering actions.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 26 Sep 2026, published 24 Sep 2026🧠 AI
Designer-RSI: Evolving Procedural Memory from User Traffic for Agentic Graphic DesignDesigner-RSI is a continual adaptation framework where a frozen frontier model (Claude-Sonnet-4/Claude-Opus-4.6) operates professional graphic design software through 230+ tools, guided by an external natural-language procedural memory that widens (learns new skills for uncovered subtasks) and deepens (revises existing skills against successes/failures) using a replay gate that only admits changes improving on past failures without regressing successes. Over five rounds on 1,406 real user briefs and 1,869 graded trajectories, the skill bank grew from 76 to 139 procedures, raising GenEval2 execution success from 72.7% to 99.3% and achieving 58%+ win rates against a no-skill baseline, demonstrating a practical route to agent self-improvement under noisy, unverifiable feedback and no human labels.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 22 Sep 2026, published 18 Sep 2026🧠 AI
MM-Future: Multi-Mode Joint World-Action Modeling for Autonomous DrivingMM-Future is a world-action model for autonomous driving that jointly generates multiple paired scene-action hypotheses, co-evolving action priors and predicted future scenes through a modality-aware diffusion Transformer. It compresses multi-view video into planning-oriented MM-Tokens and uses a future-conditioned scorer to rank trajectory candidates, achieving 94.0 PDMS and 91.5 EPDMS on NAVSIM navtest and 32.3 HD-Score in zero-shot closed-loop evaluation on HUGSIM.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 22 Sep 2026, published 17 Sep 2026🧠 AI- VIPER-MCP: Detecting Vulnerabilities in MCP Servers
VIPER-MCP is an end-to-end automated auditing framework that combines two-pass static taint analysis (anchor queries mapping alerts to specific MCP tool handlers) with feedback-driven LLM prompt evolution to both detect and dynamically confirm taint-style vulnerabilities (command injection, SSRF, path traversal) in Model Context Protocol servers. Run against 39,884 real-world open-source MCP server repositories, it discovered 106 0-day vulnerabilities — all confirmed via end-to-end exploit traces with concrete proof-of-concept natural-language prompts — resulting in 67 assigned CVEs, including a root-privilege RCE in the bytebot computer-use agent. It reports 0% false positive rate and 7.7% false negative rate, substantially outperforming existing static and dynamic MCP security baselines.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 22 Sep 2026, published 17 Sep 2026🛡️ Security
ScienceBuddy: Recursive-in-Recursive Self-Improvement for Interactive Scientific AgentsScienceBuddy is an interactive scientific research workspace with continually improving agents that turn researcher requests, feedback, and execution evidence into training tasks and evaluation rubrics. Its core contribution is "recursive-in-recursive self-improvement," where an inner recursion evolves the agent harness with the model fixed, and an outer recursion trains the model via RL under the improved harness, with each shaping the other over time. The paper presents case studies across four scientific task families and releases the system as a research product.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 22 Sep 2026, published 15 Sep 2026🧠 AI
VIPER-MCP paperVIPER-MCP is an automated auditing framework for Model Context Protocol servers that detects taint-style vulnerabilities in tool handlers and dynamically confirms exploitability via generated proof-of-concept prompts. It uses two-pass static analysis plus feedback-driven prompt evolution, and scanning 39,884 real-world MCP server repos found 106 0-day vulnerabilities with 67 CVE IDs assigned.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 22 Sep 2026, published 13 Sep 2026🛡️ Security
Programmable World ModelProgrammable World Model decouples persistent world-state evolution from visual rendering in video world models: an agent compiles natural-language instructions into executable programs governing entity states and transition rules, which a lightweight engine executes and maintains as explicit global state (including off-screen entities and non-visual attributes). State-augmented 3D oriented bounding boxes plus camera trajectory are deterministically compiled into pixel-aligned conditioning signals fed to a pretrained video model that renders the scene, enabling playable games with predefined mechanics and direct entity control. On the paper's new CombatStateBench benchmark it achieves 94% Count Accuracy and 98% State Accuracy, beating existing interactive video world models on long-horizon coherence.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 22 Sep 2026, published 9 Sep 2026🧠 AI
Procedural Graphs: Self-Evolving Execution Structures for LLM AgentsIntroduces the Procedural Graph, a structure that organizes procedural knowledge as (procedure, relation, procedure) triplets analogous to how knowledge graphs organize facts, giving LLM agents explicit step-level guidance rather than relying on unconstrained generation over accumulating history. The graph is self-evolving: an LLM refiner contrasts failed and successful trajectories to edit the graph's topology, committing edits that improve held-out validation performance while retaining rejected edits to avoid repeating mistakes. Across multiple datasets and LLMs, it outperforms memory-based baselines and can even repair flawed hand-designed expert priors.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 22 Sep 2026, published 8 Sep 2026🧠 AI
ESPO: Error-Structured Prompt Optimization via Diagnose, Diversify, and StabilizeESPO (Error-Structured Prompt Optimization) is a prompt-optimization method that addresses prompt bloat in evolutionary optimizers like GEPA by splitting the process into Diagnose (clustering training errors into structural patterns), Propose (generating diverse candidates via four independent strategies), and Select (bootstrap stability selection). Across seven NLP benchmarks (Tweet, MMLU, GSM8K, HotpotQA, ScoNe, HoVer, PUPA) it beats GEPA by 3.76pp average accuracy (74.67% vs 70.91%) while producing prompts 47% shorter, and generalizes well across student models including Gemma 3 12B, Mistral 14B, Qwen3 32B, and Claude Haiku 4.5.
arxiv.orgpaperAdded 22 Sep 2026, published 3 Sep 2026🧠 AI
AI Security BriefingThis arXiv paper introduces SkillSec-Eval, a lifecycle-aware framework for evaluating the security of reusable LLM agent skills, covering stages beyond runtime execution: repository admission, semantic retrieval, planner selection, execution, and skill evolution. The authors build a threat taxonomy across this lifecycle and empirically evaluate it against a repository of 327 real-world agent skills, showing vulnerabilities exist at multiple stages that prior work (focused mainly on prompt injection and runtime execution) has largely ignored.
arxiv.orgpaperPublished and added 18 Jul 2026🛡️ Security