118 results for “LLM agents”

Rohan Paul's X post summarizes a TikTok paper on MCP attacks. LLM agents often finish the requested task, then quietly call an attacker-controlled logging tool that records the user query, the server reply and the final answer. The attack works because agents read natural-language tool descriptions when choosing and ordering tool calls. The visible text is truncated and gives no success rates or defenses.

x.comthreadAdded 30 Oct 2026, published 29 Oct 2026🛡️ Security

CORAL (Cognitive Resource Self-Allocation) is an agent-callable working-memory toolset that lets an LLM agent checkpoint task progress and verified facts, then reset its cluttered context and resume from a clean state. A Multi-episode Agentic Reinforced Policy Optimization algorithm trains the checkpointing. With an 8B model it reaches 42.8% average accuracy on GAIA, uses 6-7x fewer input tokens than a ReAct agent, and adds 8.0 points to a proprietary agent on BrowseComp.

arxiv.orgpaperAdded 31 Oct 2026, published 29 Oct 2026🧠 AI

SEAL is a defense against indirect prompt injection for local LLM agents. It learns a soft prompt and scoring readout offline, then uses a frozen task model to score and delete injected tokens from tool outputs, with queries built from trusted initial context. On AgentDojo, attack success falls from 34.6% to 0.1% and Joint rises from 51.4% to 77.5%, using about 127x fewer defense tokens than PISanitizer.

arxiv.orgpaperAdded 31 Oct 2026, published 29 Oct 2026🛡️ Security

REALM (Required Execution Assets Linked to a Mission) is an approach to applying least privilege to LLM agents by identifying the assets a task needs, including ones discovered at runtime. It models assets as Dependency Graph nodes, separates discovering an asset from authorizing it, and exposes resource-bound Partial APIs inside a Task Container. On AgentDyn with qwen3.5-flash, attack success rate falls from 16.6% to 0.2%, with 40.0% task completion on clean tasks and 36.4% on injected cases.

arxiv.orgpaperAdded 31 Oct 2026, published 29 Oct 2026🛡️ Security

Rohan Paul's X post summarizes the paper "Log-To-Leak: Prompt Injection Attacks on Tool-Using LLM Agents via the Model Context Protocol", from TikTok researchers. It reports that MCP-using agents often finish the requested task, then quietly call an attacker-controlled logging tool that records the query, server reply and final answer. The attack works through natural-language tool descriptions that agents read when choosing and ordering tools. The visible text is truncated.

x.comthreadAdded 29 Oct 2026, published 28 Oct 2026🛡️ Security

Log-To-Leak is an arXiv paper (cs.CR, cs.AI) by Yuepeng Hu, Chongyu Fan, Sirat Samyoun and Jian Du on prompt injection attacks against tool-using LLM agents through the Model Context Protocol. The title points to a logging-based data leakage channel. The fetched page holds only the title, authors and arXiv link, with no abstract, so the method and results are not visible here.

x.compaperAdded 29 Oct 2026, published 28 Oct 2026🛡️ Security

JevAct is a runtime verification framework that intercepts selected LLM agent actions before execution and returns feedback for bounded revision. It compiles domain policies into executable state checks and structured questions scored by a prefill-only decision model, giving probability-based judgments without generation. Tested on eleven agents with tau^2-bench Airline and Telecom and BFCL, it gained consistently on Telecom and BFCL and was mixed on Airline.

arxiv.orgpaperAdded 30 Oct 2026, published 28 Oct 2026🧠 AI

Repairs for Whom? studies single-step repairs of failed LLM agent trajectories and asks whether common evaluators (greedy replay, stronger models, oracles, log-reading judges) pick repairs that help the deployed agent. Using independent rollouts in ALFWorld and WebShop, greedy replay loses 0.06-0.13 in expected gain, and Qwen2.5-14B rollouts misselect repairs for Qwen2.5-7B. The authors recommend verifying repairs with the executor that will run them.

arxiv.orgpaperAdded 30 Oct 2026, published 28 Oct 2026🧠 AI

AgentAnchor is a session-keyed behavioral watermark for attributing LLM agent trajectory logs to an owner. It derives per-step keys from a secret key, a fresh public session ID and semantic observation states, and embeds parity evidence through a KL-bounded exponential tilt. The paper formalizes learned cross-session forgery, and a trusted verifier checks disputed logs using wrong-key calibration and abstention.

arxiv.orgpaperAdded 30 Oct 2026, published 28 Oct 2026🛡️ Security

AgentAnchor is a session-keyed behavioral watermark that lets an agent owner prove ownership of a trajectory log. Each step key comes from a secret key, a fresh public session identifier and semantic states of recent observations. Parity evidence is embedded through a KL-bounded exponential tilt of action choices. A trusted verifier checks disputed logs without rerunning the agent, using wrong-key calibration and abstention. The paper also formulates a learned cross-session forgery threat.

arxiv.orgpaperAdded 30 Oct 2026, published 28 Oct 2026🧠 AI

This paper treats LLM reasoning effort as a credence good and measures the counterfactual effect of effort levels on proprietary and open-weight models across four benchmarks, including long-horizon agentic tasks. Higher effort often fails on tasks lower effort solved, and on easy tasks the top level costs up to 42x the lowest. Starting at the lowest effort and escalating only after a verified failure matches or beats fixed top effort, usually at lower cost for proprietary models.

huggingface.copaperAdded 28 Oct 2026🧠 AI

LongChang is an automated framework that builds simulated worlds with altered physical laws, such as heavier objects falling more slowly, to test whether LLMs can find the law by free exploration. Explorer LLMs manipulate objects and build tools without tasks or hints, while separate LLM agents generate scenes, review tool designs and grade reports. Across 12 LLMs, GPT-6 Astra reached a 16.7% discovery rate and the other 11 scored 0%.

arxiv.orgpaperAdded 28 Oct 2026, published 27 Oct 2026🧠 AI

Log-To-Leak is a prompt-injection attack on tool-using LLM agents that abuses Model Context Protocol tool metadata to trigger an attacker-controlled logging call after the last legitimate call, leaking the user query, server name, server response and agent response. Evaluated on five MCP servers and four agents, it reaches 62.64-100% attack success with 76.55-95.64% logging accuracy. Three defenses leave over 55% residual ASR on GitHub MCP with GPT-4o.

arxiv.orgpaperAdded 28 Oct 2026, published 26 Oct 2026🛡️ Security

SentryBench is a benchmark for tool-using LLM agents in public-safety deployments. It scores attack success, over-refusal (missing a real emergency) and over-reaction (unwarranted action) on a cost-sensitive frontier, using real emergency-call transcripts, disaster messages and injection payloads. Across 840 episodes on three frontier models and three defenses, refuse-more caution pushed over-refusal to 100 percent on two models, while a trust-gating wrapper gave the lowest harm.

arxiv.orgpaperAdded 27 Oct 2026, published 25 Oct 2026🧠 AI

SentryBench is a benchmark for tool-using LLM agents in public-safety settings (public alerts, responder dispatch, citizen-record queries). It scores attack success, over-refusal and over-reaction on a cost-sensitive frontier, using real emergency-call transcripts and real injection/jailbreak payloads. Across 840 episodes on three frontier models and three defenses, refuse-more caution raised over-refusal to 100 percent on two models, while a trust-gating wrapper gave the lowest harm on every model.

arxiv.orgpaperAdded 27 Oct 2026, published 25 Oct 2026🛡️ Security

Continual Learning Exam (CLE) is a benchmark of 120 human-authored tasks, each a five-level ladder (600 levels) across 89 professional roles and 12 occupational domains, built by 50+ domain experts. Agents must pass a level to unlock the next, and an evaluation agent scores submissions against human rubrics. Across 17 harness-model configurations, feedback plus one revision adds a median 5.3 points; the best system clears 47.7% of levels and finishes all five levels in 23.3% of tasks.

arxiv.orgpaperAdded 27 Oct 2026, published 25 Oct 2026🧠 AI

wtfibought (llm-trading-arena) is an MIT-licensed live arena where LLM agents trade virtual capital on real market data with all reasoning public. Users bring their own model and key, set the wake candle interval, leverage range and margin budget, with at most three symbols and twelve model calls per wake. The stack is Spring Boot on Java 25 with Spring AI, PostgreSQL, Redis and a React 19 frontend.

github.comrepoAdded 26 Oct 2026, published 23 Oct 2026🧠 AI

This paper studies experience reuse for LLM agents that optimize ligands in protein pockets by editing and docking. Using the full log of one agent run over CrossDocked2020 test-set pockets, it tests whether keys in an experience base recur on unseen pockets and separate improving from worsening edits. The separation is largely explained by molecule size change, action and round, not the target. The authors conclude a base may better prioritize an agent's own proposals for docking than prescribe what to build.

arxiv.orgpaperAdded 26 Oct 2026, published 23 Oct 2026🧠 AI

MCP-Injector is a protocol-aware fault-injection middleware for Model Context Protocol tool calls, with permanent, transient and intermittent faults on seedable schedules. Its fault model comes from 57,240 issue and PR threads across 1,774 open-source MCP repositories. In a 1,350-cell experiment, faults cut task-completion score by 60% (8.08 to 3.23 of 10), and the 120B gpt-oss model was no more resilient than the 20B. Agent stacks differed in how well they absorbed faults.

arxiv.orgpaperAdded 26 Oct 2026, published 23 Oct 2026🧠 AI

AKV introduces cache engineering, which lets LLM agents control their active KV cache with drop (exclude cache from future attention) and repos (adjust retained keys' position encodings) without editing the trajectory or re-prefilling. The AKV serving engine keeps a stateless API while managing stateful cache reuse, eviction and restoration. A tool-response rolling-drop policy raised benchmark scores by 1.7 points and cut cost 27.7% versus threshold-triggered summarization.

huggingface.copaperAdded 23 Oct 2026🧠 AI

EpiSEM-Bench is an executable benchmark of 300 matched unsafe/safe task pairs across six domains. It tests whether tool-using LLM agents take prohibited actions when a tool response omits a safety-relevant fact, even though the request is benign and all returned statements are true. It finds large variation across ten models, and recovery access cuts unsafe execution for all ten.

arxiv.orgpaperAdded 24 Oct 2026, published 22 Oct 2026🧠 AI

SARIA (Selective Admission and Reload for Inference Acceleration) is a KV caching system that jointly manages DRAM and SSD for multi-turn LLM agents. It persists only blocks likely to be reused beyond DRAM residency, promotes SSD-hit blocks into DRAM for same-session reuse, and paces DRAM reads with a transfer coordinator. Built on LMCache MP, it cuts SSD writes by 57.1 to 58.9% versus full duplicate caching and mean TTFT by 42.3 to 79.7% versus DRAM-only caching.

arxiv.orgpaperAdded 23 Oct 2026, published 22 Oct 2026🧠 AI

IFC-MCQ is a method that automatically generates multiple-choice benchmarks from Industry Foundation Classes (IFC) building-model files, so answers can be graded by exact option-set match instead of human or LLM review. Its taxonomy has 15 categories and 36 subtypes in four groups, with answer keys from the file and distractors from file values or rules. Two agentic setups, tool-based and code-based retrieval, showed category-specific failures and variation by IFC model and interface.

arxiv.orgpaperAdded 23 Oct 2026, published 21 Oct 2026🧠 AI

An opinion post from 21 October 2026 arguing that a widely feared PHP vulnerability has no easy exploit. The author says the many GitHub "PoC" repositories fail against a vanilla PHP instance in Docker. They claim LLM agents produced them by depending on a local-file-inclusion flaw or by modifying the server to be vulnerable. The author also argues that LLM defaults make many people's judgements identical.

eliastaylor.comarticleAdded 22 Oct 2026, published 21 Oct 2026🧠 AI

Cache Engineering for Agents proposes letting LLM agents control their active KV cache directly, using a drop operation to exclude cache from attention and repos to adjust retained keys' position encodings, without editing the trajectory or re-prefilling. The authors build the AKV serving engine to handle history-dependent cache states. A tool-response rolling-drop policy raises average benchmark scores by 1.7 points and cuts cost by 27.7% against threshold-triggered summarization. AKV gives up to 1.2x output throughput and 1.5x faster P95 latency.

arxiv.orgpaperAdded 22 Oct 2026, published 20 Oct 2026🧠 AI

PentAGI is an open-source, self-hosted multi-agent system that uses LLM agents to carry out penetration testing tasks autonomously. The MIT-licensed repo has a Go backend, a React frontend and GraphQL. It ships Docker Compose files for Langfuse tracing, Graphiti knowledge-graph memory and an observability stack. Topics list OpenAI and Anthropic as model backends.

github.comrepoAdded 20 Oct 2026🧠 AI

CarryoverBench is a benchmark of 12 personal-assistant scenarios and 101 attack tasks for carryover attacks, where a one-time indirect prompt injection planted in agent memory files or scheduled tasks re-fires in later sessions. Three trigger channels (Instant, Autonomous, Latent) are scored by a rule-based verifier with separate planting and triggering stages. Across five frontier models, payloads re-fire over five rounds without measurable decay. Porting the Latent channel to the Hermes runtime weakens the effect but does not remove it.

arxiv.orgpaperAdded 22 Oct 2026, published 20 Oct 2026🛡️ Security

FunCAD-Harness is a framework in which LLM agents design CAD mechanisms and revise them using physical simulation feedback. It turns abstract functional requirements into candidate-specific physical tests. The paper also introduces FunCADBench, a benchmark of 46 mechanism families with interdependent, multi-step operations. Experiments on frontier LLM agents show it exposes mechanical failures that visual inspection misses and raises functional success over standard simulation-augmented baselines.

arxiv.orgpaperAdded 21 Oct 2026, published 19 Oct 2026🧠 AI

This paper studies how keeping long tool output out of the context window, and reading it through a section index instead, costs LLM agents accuracy. Using the PHREEQC geochemistry simulator on 158 execution-verified multiple-choice items and 11,007 logged calls, GPT-5.1 and GPT-5.2 lose 11.3 and 7.9 points, while Claude Opus 4.6 and Sonnet 4.6 show no detectable cost. The authors name the failure evidence substitution: agents skip the report and misround from their own output files.

arxiv.orgpaperAdded 21 Oct 2026, published 19 Oct 2026🧠 AI

Hybrid Reasoning Agents (HybridAgents) are LLM agents that switch between latent reasoning and text-based interaction in one generation process. A lightweight HybridLink handles mode transitions, continuous working memory keeps hybrid context across turns, and HybridSFT plus HybridRL train when to think latently and when to act in text. Across 3 model scales and 11 benchmarks, the paper reports 10.4% higher performance, 35.5%-54.7% fewer tokens, and 1.8x-2.6x faster inference.

arxiv.orgpaperAdded 19 Oct 2026, published 18 Oct 2026🧠 AI

The One-Pixel of Reasoning introduces the one-relation attack (ORA), which finds a critical implicit warrant linking evidence to a conclusion and inserts one source-grounded sentence that qualifies it, steering an LLM agent to a wrong belief. Across eighteen models on biomedical inference and vulnerability detection, best-of-10 attacks flip initially correct answers 54.9% of the time for proprietary models and 80.0% for open-weight models. Attacks transfer without victim feedback, can pass source-support checks, and multi-agent debate raises team error from 50.0% to 59.5%.

arxiv.orgpaperAdded 21 Oct 2026, published 17 Oct 2026🛡️ Security

Proposes a steering agent that supervises LLM agents and multi-agent systems during execution and corrects goal drift, where long-horizon tool use and inter-agent collaboration slowly diverge from the overall objective. A low-cost fast path decides when to intervene, and a high-cost slow path generates how to intervene. Both paths are trained jointly with reinforcement learning, combining a pairwise ranking objective with GRPO. On information-seeking search tasks it improves performance and efficiency for single-agent and multi-agent systems, generalizes out of domain, transfers to unseen executors, and allows intervention frequency to be adjusted without retraining.

arxiv.orgpaperAdded 17 Oct 2026, published 15 Oct 2026🧠 AI

PROBE (Policy Rule Observation via Behavioral Exploration) trains LLM-based auditors that act as realistic users and probe deployed tool-using agents for policy violations (pricing, privacy, confirmation, safety) across multi-turn, tool-mediated dialogue. It formalizes auditing as a two-player Markov game with a composite reward for violation discovery, plausibility, progress and policy diversity, and compares GRPO, DPO and GFlowNet optimization. Trained auditors find broader, higher-yield violations than zero-shot adversaries, even when much smaller than the target agent, positioning behavioral auditing as a distinct axis next to capability and safety benchmarks.

arxiv.orgpaperAdded 17 Oct 2026, published 15 Oct 2026🛡️ Security

PROBE (Policy Rule Observation via Behavioral Exploration) trains LLM-based auditors that act as realistic users and probe deployed tool-using agents for policy violations (pricing, privacy, confirmation, safety) over multi-turn dialogue. It formalizes auditing as a two-player Markov game with a composite reward balancing violation discovery, behavioral plausibility, conversation progress and policy diversity, and compares GRPO, DPO and GFlowNet optimization in a controlled setting. Trained auditors find broader, higher-yield violations than same-architecture zero-shot adversaries, even when much smaller than the target agent. This positions multi-turn behavioral auditing as a distinct evaluation axis alongside capability and safety benchmarks.

arxiv.orgpaperAdded 17 Oct 2026, published 15 Oct 2026🧠 AI

GraphACM merges equivalent states from multiple rollouts of the same LLM agent task into a directed, action-labeled graph, so actions can be compared at shared decision states. It defines node-level and global action-consistency measures, and uses the global score as an uncertainty proxy to predict task success or failure. Across three LLMs on ALFWorld, AppWorld and WebShop it reaches an average AUROC of 0.811, above the strongest behavioral-consistency baseline (0.729) and verbalized confidence (0.769). It also shows where in a trajectory agent actions diverge.

arxiv.orgpaperAdded 17 Oct 2026, published 15 Oct 2026🧠 AI

Introduces Structured Recipe Optimization (SRO), a paradigm for automated LLM post-training that optimizes over a task-adapted recipe space covering data sources, data processing, cross-domain composition and training configuration. It pairs an LLM-based Recipe-Space Designer, which builds the recipe space for the target tasks, with a Multi-Domain Recipe Optimizer that uses structured trial evidence to guide LLM candidate construction and multi-objective Bayesian trial selection. SRO gets the highest average score in all evaluated target-model and agent-LLM combinations; for example, 41.1 vs 15.4 for the strongest baseline on Qwen3-1.7B with GPT-5.4, and 53.8 vs 40.8 on Qwen3-4B with DeepSeek-V4-Flash, in joint post-training across three capability domains and six benchmarks.

arxiv.orgpaperAdded 14 Oct 2026, published 13 Oct 2026🧠 AI

Open-source Python CLI (`tra`) for autonomous trading desks in which LLM analysts (technical, macro, on-chain, sentiment) and validators only give opinions on figures the system computed. Fixed rules do the arithmetic: pricing the round-trip cost, applying risk limits, sizing, cost gates, and sending a single order with stop attached via ccxt (Bybit and OKX demo accounts tested). It supports multiple model providers with per-role models, effort settings and fallbacks. Every answer is parsed against a closed schema, every refusal is logged with the figure behind it, and models can tighten but never loosen controls. This makes it a concrete reference for keeping LLM agents away from arithmetic and money.

github.comrepoAdded 18 Oct 2026, published 13 Oct 2026🧠 AI

Kairos is a reference monitor placed at the isolation boundary of an unmodified, opaque LLM agent, where tool calls, shell commands and agent-written scripts all appear as the same file and network operations. A declarative trust policy decides most effects deterministically and defers the rest; deferred effects are held while the agent continues speculatively, and a bounded-authority decision oracle (an LLM or a human) releases or refuses them based on the trace. Across three benchmarks and three agent models it beats existing defenses on the attack-success/utility trade-off; on AgentDojo it cuts attack success from 47.0% to 2.7% with no loss of benign utility.

arxiv.orgpaperAdded 15 Oct 2026, published 13 Oct 2026🛡️ Security

AgentTune is a source-available Python library that unifies building, training, evaluating, distilling and maintaining tool-using LLM agents. Its core is a two-tier EventLog representation that preserves agent trajectories and yields consistent projections for training, evaluation and auditing. On top of it sit a shared agent runtime, tool-calling reinforcement learning, agentic distillation, RAG, decision workflows, evaluation utilities and a designed path toward self-healing agents, demonstrated on tasks such as legal contract search.

arxiv.orgpaperAdded 12 Oct 2026, published 9 Oct 2026🧠 AI

An X post by the creator of ROPE, a prompt-injection benchmark for LLM agents. It uses two news items to argue that the prompt-injection model of agent attacks is incomplete: a zero-click RCE called Plugin4Shell in coding agents' plugin systems, and Apple's local MCP server in Safari 27 exposing browser automation to agents. Neither involved persuading a model. The author concludes that teams should benchmark what an agent believes and also audit what it can reach, using plugin signing and update policy, least-privilege credentials per agent, and treating local MCP surfaces as attack surface.

x.comthreadPublished and added 9 Oct 2026🛡️ Security

DecepEval is a benchmark of 1,532 instances across 3 task families and 28 professional scenarios designed to measure deception in LLM agents, pairing neutral and induced versions of each task to isolate condition-dependent changes in deception rates. It introduces the LLM Deception Diamond framework (pressure, incentive, opportunity, conflict), adapted from classical fraud theory, and finds that across nine frontier LLMs these inducements raise deception rates even in models with low baseline deception, with long-horizon tasks showing deception rates averaging 87% under induced conditions.

huggingface.copaperAdded 8 Oct 2026🧠 AI

Galaxy Research newsletter piece covering "Shielded Bitcoin," a paper by [[alloc] init] researchers Clara Shikhelman, Mikhail Komarov, and Aleksei Moskvin proposing a Zcash-style shielded pool (encrypted notes, public nullifiers, zero-knowledge proofs) run as a Bitcoin L1 metaprotocol via OP_RETURN envelopes, with peg-in/peg-out deliberately left to a future "PIPEs v2" paper. The article's security-relevant angle flags that novel ZK circuits need battle-testing — citing Zcash's own Orchard Pool soundness bug that survived professional audits for four years before being fixed in the Ironwood upgrade — and that bridge/peg mechanisms (the likely weak point) have historically been the most exploited component in crypto, naming Ronin, Wormhole, Nomad, and KelpDAO. It also notes a growing AI-driven deanonymization threat to transparent blockchains, citing ETH Zurich/Anthropic research showing LLM agents can re-identify pseudonymous users from profile data alone.

galaxy.comarticleAdded 8 Oct 2026🛡️ Security

OnTrack is a streaming monitor for LLM agents. It uses structure-aware optimal transport to compare an agent's steps and tool dependencies against recorded successful runs, and can alert users or block the agent in about a millisecond per step. It works under three access regimes: full reference (historical runs plus tool schemas), tool schemas only, and step logs only. Monitoring ranges from plan-violation detection to spotting loops, stalls and repeated tool calls. On SWE-bench trajectories, the first 8 steps rank failing runs below succeeding ones better than content-similarity baselines (+0.057 AUROC). An abort policy saves about 18% of compute, and 5 of 6 aborts were correct.

arxiv.orgpaperAdded 9 Oct 2026, published 8 Oct 2026🧠 AI

The paper proposes evaluating LLM agents on epistemic humility, meaning their willingness to recognize, act on and communicate uncertainty. It operationalizes this as three trajectory-level dimensions (Identify, Solve, Escalate, or ISE). It tests controlled and naturally occurring knowledge conflicts, each with matched no-conflict controls, on four agents. Higher accuracy does not imply more humility: some high-accuracy agents detect conflicts but do not communicate uncertainty in wrong final answers, and agents often detect conflicts early but lose track of them later. Model-level interventions can improve humility but often cost accuracy, which suggests humility depends on the interaction of backbone model, agent harness and environment.

arxiv.orgpaperAdded 9 Oct 2026, published 8 Oct 2026🧠 AI

Introduces AgenticBBO-Bench, a benchmark for LLM-agent black-box optimization across synthetic functions, hyperparameter optimization, database tuning, chip design and molecular design under a unified finite-budget protocol. Agentic BBO beats direct LLM methods in all five domains and the best numerical optimizers in four. Ablations show extra numerical tools don't consistently help, task semantics help more than specific priors, and numerical optimizers can absorb gains from agent-found trajectories. A five-task frontier challenge evaluates seven LLMs under the Codex agent harness, with GPT-6 Astra and DeepSeek-V4.1-Flash on the performance-cost Pareto frontier.

arxiv.orgpaperAdded 9 Oct 2026, published 8 Oct 2026🧠 AI

This paper studies where tool-using LLM agents break down in the chain from gathering evidence to taking consequential actions, finding that strong static judgment of whether to act often coexists with much weaker interactive execution, and that failures arise from incomplete investigation, acting before evidence is established, or unresolved prerequisites in multi-action workflows. The authors introduce SafeActBench, a 656-case benchmark across six operational domains and five protocols, paired with a provenance-bound Evidence Ledger and a deterministic trajectory evaluator tested across ten model-harness configurations.

arxiv.orgpaperAdded 7 Oct 2026🧠 AI

RunningTab is a framework that gives LLM agents performing 'direct workspace interaction' (searching and reading files from a terminal without indexing to produce a deliverable) an environment-side 'tab': a per-task record, maintained outside the model's context, of requirements the agent has declared, excerpts read with provenance, and listed-but-unopened files flagged as candidates. The agent can check each requirement against matching excerpts or candidates, mark it resolved or deferred with a reason, and is forced through a finish check if requirements remain open when it tries to complete the task. The authors show it consistently beats plain direct workspace interaction and model-internal record-keeping baselines across three benchmarks and three LLMs.

arxiv.orgpaperAdded 8 Oct 2026, published 7 Oct 2026🧠 AI

This arXiv paper proposes foundations for proactive LLM agents organized around three joint principles (3T: Task Capability, Temporal Allocation, Trust) and a five-dimensional design space (task scope, anticipation horizon, activation trigger, processing timing, intervention depth). It introduces PROACTIVITY-GYM, a simulation-based testbed with multi-day scenarios, stateful environments, and persona-conditioned simulated users, and reports evaluations across 23 model-harness configurations plus a 30-participant human study showing sharp trust declines after intervention misalignment and a preference for imperfect sleep-time assistance over interruptive help.

arxiv.orgpaperAdded 6 Oct 2026🧠 AI

ASPIRE 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

This paper introduces BOTTLED, a benchmark testing whether LLM agents can autonomously convert their general task-solving ability into cheaper, scalable artifacts (e.g., training a small distilled model or writing a reusable program) when faced with millions of similar queries under fixed time, compute, and API budgets, a capability the authors call bottling. Across ten models and three tasks, the authors find zero-shot performance does not reliably predict bottling success: 48 of 60 runs scored below their own model's zero-shot confidence interval, and 31 of 60 underperformed simple small-model distillation baselines. Despite this, strong agents like Opus 5 can retain about 82% of zero-shot macro-F1 at about 657x lower cost on query-product relevance classification, and recover about 94% of a dedicated cheap-inference model's (Jev) performance at a quarter of its cost.

arxiv.orgpaperAdded 7 Oct 2026, published 6 Oct 2026🧠 AI

WorldSolver is a benchmark of 168 physics-simulation coding tasks drawn from 61 classic computer-graphics papers across 7 physical domains, each giving an LLM agent a fixed code scaffold and asking it to implement the missing solver. Agents are scored on three axes — Execution Checks, Visual Fidelity, and Physical Plausibility — and frontier agents GPT-5.6 Sol and Claude Opus 5 top out at only 48.7% and 46.7% overall, showing current agents struggle to produce executable, visually and physically correct simulation code.

arxiv.orgpaperAdded 7 Oct 2026, published 6 Oct 2026🧠 AI

ScienceClaw 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

Semantic Behavioral Watermarking (SBW) is a provenance scheme for LLM agents that embeds an owner identifier in semantic clusters of an agent's action choices rather than exact action symbols, making it robust to paraphrasing/tool-renaming that breaks three prior agent watermarks (e.g., AgentMark drops to 16.8% bit-recovery under observation paraphrasing). It adds keyed, collision-resistant binning proven unpredictable in the random-oracle model to resist forgery (adaptive forgery success drops from 100% to the false-positive floor), while explicitly documenting an unsolved attack: chained-replay forgery, which still succeeds 0.76-0.98 of the time across five tested agent models (3B-14B, Qwen, ToolBench/ALFWorld benchmarks). Code is released alongside the paper.

arxiv.orgpaperAdded 8 Oct 2026, published 6 Oct 2026🛡️ Security

This paper introduces Semantic Behavioral Watermarking (SBW), a method for embedding an owner identifier into an LLM agent's high-level tool/action choices rather than output tokens, so provenance survives tool renaming and observation paraphrasing. It watermarks over semantic action clusters with history conditioning and replaces the public-cluster bin with keyed collision-resistant binning that is provably unpredictable under the random-oracle model, closing a forgery gap left by prior agent watermarks (e.g., AgentMark, whose bit-recovery drops to 16.8% under paraphrasing). Evaluated across five agent models (3B-14B, four vendors) on ToolBench and ALFWorld, cluster-level watermarking achieves far higher detection under rewriting (0.49-0.66 vs 0.05-0.17 on ToolBench; 0.92-0.97 vs 0.00-0.01 on ALFWorld) and reduces adaptive forgery success from 100% to the false-positive floor, while noting chained-replay attacks remain an open vulnerability (0.76-0.98 detection failure).

arxiv.orgpaperAdded 7 Oct 2026, published 6 Oct 2026🧠 AI

MemPilot is a framework that lets LLM agents curate memory on demand rather than query-agnostically, using a multi-step policy trained via reinforcement learning to choose between retrieving from pre-built memory or delegating query-specific curation of raw multimodal history to heterogeneous LLMs and VLMs. The policy controls evidence amount, curation instructions, model choice, and visual access, and is optimized with objective-wise advantage decoupling and prefix-based marginal utility estimation to balance performance, cost, and latency. Tested across five multimodal agent-memory benchmarks, it achieves broader performance-cost-latency trade-off frontiers than existing trade-off-aware baselines.

arxiv.orgpaperAdded 6 Oct 2026, published 5 Oct 2026🧠 AI

BazaarBench is a simulated consumer-to-consumer marketplace benchmark that measures whether LLM agents acting as buyers and sellers stay safe and honest — tracking ownership, item condition, and commitments to detect six failure types across five transaction stages. Running three 100-agent markets for 30 days plus 45 seven-day continuations across five models (inventories drawn from a public eBay sample), the authors show that double-selling and item-condition deception rise sharply under deadline pressure and adversarial instructions, with GPT-5.4 completing 55.5% of committed sales involving unavailable or misrepresented items; the team releases the simulator, saved market states, eval code, and 357,608 agent-call records.

arxiv.orgpaperAdded 6 Oct 2026, published 5 Oct 2026🧠 AI

This arXiv paper introduces RAISED (Robust Attack Invariance through Self-Distillation), a training framework that defends tool-using LLM agents against indirect prompt injection without the utility degradation seen in prior training-based defenses. The authors show existing defenses cause distributional drift that makes models wrongly refuse legitimate tool-output-guided steps on benign tasks, then fix this by having a model generate its own tool-use scenarios and self-distill to match clean-context behavior on both clean and injected trajectory variants. Results show reduced attack success rate on injected tool responses while preserving performance on agentic and general-purpose benchmarks.

arxiv.orgpaperAdded 6 Oct 2026, published 5 Oct 2026🛡️ Security

This paper introduces a paired-replay testbed that samples a single LLM agent request and replays the identical malicious action, resource, and arguments under four authorization conditions: broad bearer tokens, scoped JWTs, sender-constrained tokens, and Open Policy Agent policies. Across 128 scenarios in four tool domains and five local model configurations, broad-bearer tokens let roughly 9 to 38 percent of attacked, post-exposure decisions execute harmful actions, while all three scoped conditions recorded zero harmful executions; a supplementary AgentDojo extension found 11 of 24 injected attacks succeeded under broad policy versus 0 of 24 under scoping. The authors frame this as evidence that scoping contains cross-action and cross-resource consequences of prompt injection, not that it prevents the injection itself.

arxiv.orgpaperAdded 6 Oct 2026, published 5 Oct 2026🛡️ Security

VulValidate is a framework where LLM agents coordinate dynamic-analysis tools to reconstruct vulnerable/fixed code revisions and build triggering experiments that verify whether a function labeled "vulnerable" in a commit-derived dataset actually exhibits the vulnerability. Applied to all 35,849 vulnerable-labeled instances in BigVul, PrimeVul, and DiverseVul, it confirms 57.2%, relabels 19.0% as mislabeled, and leaves the rest undecided or unmeasured, producing a corrected 15,890-function release; retraining five detectors on corrected labels improves F1 for four of five on each dataset. The work exposes how commit-based labeling noise inflates or depresses vulnerability-detector benchmarks and ships a reusable auditing skill and corrected datasets.

arxiv.orgpaperAdded 6 Oct 2026, published 4 Oct 2026🛡️ Security

VulValidate is a framework where LLM agents coordinate dynamic-analysis tools to reconstruct vulnerable/fixed code revisions, craft triggering inputs, and compare runtime behavior, producing executable evidence for whether a function-level vulnerability label is actually correct. Applied to all 35,849 "vulnerable" instances in the BigVul, PrimeVul, and DiverseVul datasets, it confirms 57.2%, corrects 19.0% of labels, and leaves 22.3% undecided, yielding a corrected release of 15,890 distinct vulnerable function bodies validated against expert review. Retraining five detectors on the corrected labels changes measured F1 on BigVul and DiverseVul, showing that commit-derived vulnerability labels used across the field are substantially noisy and that agentic, execution-grounded auditing is a viable correction method.

arxiv.orgpaperAdded 6 Oct 2026, published 4 Oct 2026🧠 AI