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May 29

AutoBnB-RAG: Enhancing Multi-Agent Incident Response with Retrieval-Augmented Generation

Incident response (IR) requires fast, coordinated, and well-informed decision-making to contain and mitigate cyber threats. While large language models (LLMs) have shown promise as autonomous agents in simulated IR settings, their reasoning is often limited by a lack of access to external knowledge. In this work, we present AutoBnB-RAG, an extension of the AutoBnB framework that incorporates retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) into multi-agent incident response simulations. Built on the Backdoors & Breaches (B&B) tabletop game environment, AutoBnB-RAG enables agents to issue retrieval queries and incorporate external evidence during collaborative investigations. We introduce two retrieval settings: one grounded in curated technical documentation (RAG-Wiki), and another using narrative-style incident reports (RAG-News). We evaluate performance across eight team structures, including newly introduced argumentative configurations designed to promote critical reasoning. To validate practical utility, we also simulate real-world cyber incidents based on public breach reports, demonstrating AutoBnB-RAG's ability to reconstruct complex multi-stage attacks. Our results show that retrieval augmentation improves decision quality and success rates across diverse organizational models. This work demonstrates the value of integrating retrieval mechanisms into LLM-based multi-agent systems for cybersecurity decision-making.

  • 2 authors
·
Aug 18, 2025

Adaptive Autonomy in Human-on-the-Loop Vision-Based Robotics Systems

Computer vision approaches are widely used by autonomous robotic systems to sense the world around them and to guide their decision making as they perform diverse tasks such as collision avoidance, search and rescue, and object manipulation. High accuracy is critical, particularly for Human-on-the-loop (HoTL) systems where decisions are made autonomously by the system, and humans play only a supervisory role. Failures of the vision model can lead to erroneous decisions with potentially life or death consequences. In this paper, we propose a solution based upon adaptive autonomy levels, whereby the system detects loss of reliability of these models and responds by temporarily lowering its own autonomy levels and increasing engagement of the human in the decision-making process. Our solution is applicable for vision-based tasks in which humans have time to react and provide guidance. When implemented, our approach would estimate the reliability of the vision task by considering uncertainty in its model, and by performing covariate analysis to determine when the current operating environment is ill-matched to the model's training data. We provide examples from DroneResponse, in which small Unmanned Aerial Systems are deployed for Emergency Response missions, and show how the vision model's reliability would be used in addition to confidence scores to drive and specify the behavior and adaptation of the system's autonomy. This workshop paper outlines our proposed approach and describes open challenges at the intersection of Computer Vision and Software Engineering for the safe and reliable deployment of vision models in the decision making of autonomous systems.

  • 8 authors
·
Mar 28, 2021

Multi-Agent LLM Orchestration Achieves Deterministic, High-Quality Decision Support for Incident Response

Large language models (LLMs) promise to accelerate incident response in production systems, yet single-agent approaches generate vague, unusable recommendations. We present MyAntFarm.ai, a reproducible containerized framework demonstrating that multi-agent orchestration fundamentally transforms LLM-based incident response quality. Through 348 controlled trials comparing single-agent copilot versus multi-agent systems on identical incident scenarios, we find that multi-agent orchestration achieves 100% actionable recommendation rate versus 1.7% for single-agent approaches, an 80 times improvement in action specificity and 140 times improvement in solution correctness. Critically, multi-agent systems exhibit zero quality variance across all trials, enabling production SLA commitments impossible with inconsistent single-agent outputs. Both architectures achieve similar comprehension latency (approx.40s), establishing that the architectural value lies in deterministic quality, not speed. We introduce Decision Quality (DQ), a novel metric capturing validity, specificity, and correctness properties essential for operational deployment that existing LLM metrics do not address. These findings reframe multi-agent orchestration from a performance optimization to a production-readiness requirement for LLM-based incident response. All code, Docker configurations, and trial data are publicly available for reproduction.

  • 1 authors
·
Nov 19, 2025

AgentWall: A Runtime Safety Layer for Local AI Agents

The safety of autonomous AI agents is increasingly recognized as a critical open problem. As agents transition from passive text generators to active actors capable of executing shell commands, modifying files, calling APIs, and browsing the web, the consequences of unsafe or adversarially manipulated behavior become immediate and tangible. Existing AI safety work has focused primarily on model alignment and input filtering, but these approaches do not address what happens at the moment an agent's intent becomes a real action on a real machine. This gap is especially acute in local environments, where developers run agents against their own filesystems, credentials, and infrastructure with little runtime control. This paper introduces AgentWall, a runtime safety and observability layer for local AI agents. AgentWall intercepts every proposed agent action before it reaches the host environment, evaluates it against an explicit declarative policy, requires human approval for sensitive operations, and records a complete execution trail for audit and replay. It is implemented as a policy-enforcing MCP proxy and native OpenClaw plugin, working across Claude Desktop, Cursor, Windsurf, Claude Code, and OpenClaw with a single install command. We present the design, architecture, threat model, and policy model of AgentWall, and demonstrate 92.9% policy enforcement accuracy with sub-millisecond overhead across 14 benchmark tests. AgentWall is open-source at https://github.com/agentwall/Agentwall.

  • 1 authors
·
Mar 23 1

Enhancing Safety and Robustness of Vision-Based Controllers via Reachability Analysis

Autonomous systems, such as self-driving cars and drones, have made significant strides in recent years by leveraging visual inputs and machine learning for decision-making and control. Despite their impressive performance, these vision-based controllers can make erroneous predictions when faced with novel or out-of-distribution inputs. Such errors can cascade into catastrophic system failures and compromise system safety. In this work, we compute Neural Reachable Tubes, which act as parameterized approximations of Backward Reachable Tubes to stress-test the vision-based controllers and mine their failure modes. The identified failures are then used to enhance the system safety through both offline and online methods. The online approach involves training a classifier as a run-time failure monitor to detect closed-loop, system-level failures, subsequently triggering a fallback controller that robustly handles these detected failures to preserve system safety. For the offline approach, we improve the original controller via incremental training using a carefully augmented failure dataset, resulting in a more robust controller that is resistant to the known failure modes. In either approach, the system is safeguarded against shortcomings that transcend the vision-based controller and pertain to the closed-loop safety of the overall system. We validate the proposed approaches on an autonomous aircraft taxiing task that involves using a vision-based controller to guide the aircraft towards the centerline of the runway. Our results show the efficacy of the proposed algorithms in identifying and handling system-level failures, outperforming methods that rely on controller prediction error or uncertainty quantification for identifying system failures.

  • 3 authors
·
Oct 29, 2024

Automating Safety Enhancement for LLM-based Agents with Synthetic Risk Scenarios

Large Language Model (LLM)-based agents are increasingly deployed in real-world applications such as "digital assistants, autonomous customer service, and decision-support systems", where their ability to "interact in multi-turn, tool-augmented environments" makes them indispensable. However, ensuring the safety of these agents remains a significant challenge due to the diverse and complex risks arising from dynamic user interactions, external tool usage, and the potential for unintended harmful behaviors. To address this critical issue, we propose AutoSafe, the first framework that systematically enhances agent safety through fully automated synthetic data generation. Concretely, 1) we introduce an open and extensible threat model, OTS, which formalizes how unsafe behaviors emerge from the interplay of user instructions, interaction contexts, and agent actions. This enables precise modeling of safety risks across diverse scenarios. 2) we develop a fully automated data generation pipeline that simulates unsafe user behaviors, applies self-reflective reasoning to generate safe responses, and constructs a large-scale, diverse, and high-quality safety training dataset-eliminating the need for hazardous real-world data collection. To evaluate the effectiveness of our framework, we design comprehensive experiments on both synthetic and real-world safety benchmarks. Results demonstrate that AutoSafe boosts safety scores by 45% on average and achieves a 28.91% improvement on real-world tasks, validating the generalization ability of our learned safety strategies. These results highlight the practical advancement and scalability of AutoSafe in building safer LLM-based agents for real-world deployment. We have released the project page at https://auto-safe.github.io/.

  • 10 authors
·
May 23, 2025 1

AJAR: Adaptive Jailbreak Architecture for Red-teaming

As Large Language Models (LLMs) evolve from static chatbots into autonomous agents capable of tool execution, the landscape of AI safety is shifting from content moderation to action security. However, existing red-teaming frameworks remain bifurcated: they either focus on rigid, script-based text attacks or lack the architectural modularity to simulate complex, multi-turn agentic exploitations. In this paper, we introduce AJAR (Adaptive Jailbreak Architecture for Red-teaming), a proof-of-concept framework designed to bridge this gap through Protocol-driven Cognitive Orchestration. Built upon the robust runtime of Petri, AJAR leverages the Model Context Protocol (MCP) to decouple adversarial logic from the execution loop, encapsulating state-of-the-art algorithms like X-Teaming as standardized, plug-and-play services. We validate the architectural feasibility of AJAR through a controlled qualitative case study, demonstrating its ability to perform stateful backtracking within a tool-use environment. Furthermore, our preliminary exploration of the "Agentic Gap" reveals a complex safety dynamic: while tool usage introduces new injection vectors via code execution, the cognitive load of parameter formatting can inadvertently disrupt persona-based attacks. AJAR is open-sourced to facilitate the standardized, environment-aware evaluation of this emerging attack surface. The code and data are available at https://github.com/douyipu/ajar.

  • 2 authors
·
Jan 15

ILION: Deterministic Pre-Execution Safety Gates for Agentic AI Systems

The proliferation of autonomous AI agents capable of executing real-world actions - filesystem operations, API calls, database modifications, financial transactions - introduces a class of safety risk not addressed by existing content-moderation infrastructure. Current text-safety systems evaluate linguistic content for harm categories such as violence, hate speech, and sexual content; they are architecturally unsuitable for evaluating whether a proposed action falls within an agent's authorized operational scope. We present ILION (Intelligent Logic Identity Operations Network), a deterministic execution gate for agentic AI systems. ILION employs a five-component cascade architecture - Transient Identity Imprint (TII), Semantic Vector Reference Frame (SVRF), Identity Drift Control (IDC), Identity Resonance Score (IRS) and Consensus Veto Layer (CVL) - to classify proposed agent actions as BLOCK or ALLOW without statistical training or API dependencies. The system requires zero labeled data, operates in sub-millisecond latency, and produces fully interpretable verdicts. We evaluate ILION on ILION-Bench v2, a purpose-built benchmark of 380 test scenarios across eight attack categories with 39% hard-difficulty adversarial cases and a held-out development split. ILION achieves F1 = 0.8515, precision = 91.0%, and a false positive rate of 7.9% at a mean latency of 143 microseconds. Comparative evaluation against three baselines - Lakera Guard (F1 = 0.8087), OpenAI Moderation API (F1 = 0.1188), and Llama Guard 3 (F1 = 0.0105) - demonstrates that existing text-safety infrastructure systematically fails on agent execution safety tasks due to a fundamental task mismatch. ILION outperforms the best commercial baseline by 4.3 F1 points while operating 2,000 times faster with a false positive rate four times lower.

  • 1 authors
·
Feb 22

AOI: Turning Failed Trajectories into Training Signals for Autonomous Cloud Diagnosis

Large language model (LLM) agents offer a promising data-driven approach to automating Site Reliability Engineering (SRE), yet their enterprise deployment is constrained by three challenges: restricted access to proprietary data, unsafe action execution under permission-governed environments, and the inability of closed systems to improve from failures. We present AOI (Autonomous Operations Intelligence), a trainable multi-agent framework formulating automated operations as a structured trajectory learning problem under security constraints. Our approach integrates three key components. First, a trainable diagnostic system applies Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) to distill expert-level knowledge into locally deployed open-source models, enabling preference-based learning without exposing sensitive data. Second, a read-write separated execution architecture decomposes operational trajectories into observation, reasoning, and action phases, allowing safe learning while preventing unauthorized state mutation. Third, a Failure Trajectory Closed-Loop Evolver mines unsuccessful trajectories and converts them into corrective supervision signals, enabling continual data augmentation. Evaluated on the AIOpsLab benchmark, our contributions yield cumulative gains. (1) The AOI runtime alone achieves 66.3% best@5 success on all 86 tasks, outperforming the prior state-of-the-art (41.9%) by 24.4 points. (2) Adding Observer GRPO training, a locally deployed 14B model reaches 42.9% avg@1 on 63 held-out tasks with unseen fault types, surpassing Claude Sonnet 4.5. (3) The Evolver converts 37 failed trajectories into diagnostic guidance, improving end-to-end avg@5 by 4.8 points while reducing variance by 35%.

  • 14 authors
·
Mar 16

REAL: Resilience and Adaptation using Large Language Models on Autonomous Aerial Robots

Large Language Models (LLMs) pre-trained on internet-scale datasets have shown impressive capabilities in code understanding, synthesis, and general purpose question-and-answering. Key to their performance is the substantial prior knowledge acquired during training and their ability to reason over extended sequences of symbols, often presented in natural language. In this work, we aim to harness the extensive long-term reasoning, natural language comprehension, and the available prior knowledge of LLMs for increased resilience and adaptation in autonomous mobile robots. We introduce REAL, an approach for REsilience and Adaptation using LLMs. REAL provides a strategy to employ LLMs as a part of the mission planning and control framework of an autonomous robot. The LLM employed by REAL provides (i) a source of prior knowledge to increase resilience for challenging scenarios that the system had not been explicitly designed for; (ii) a way to interpret natural-language and other log/diagnostic information available in the autonomy stack, for mission planning; (iii) a way to adapt the control inputs using minimal user-provided prior knowledge about the dynamics/kinematics of the robot. We integrate REAL in the autonomy stack of a real multirotor, querying onboard an offboard LLM at 0.1-1.0 Hz as part the robot's mission planning and control feedback loops. We demonstrate in real-world experiments the ability of the LLM to reduce the position tracking errors of a multirotor under the presence of (i) errors in the parameters of the controller and (ii) unmodeled dynamics. We also show (iii) decision making to avoid potentially dangerous scenarios (e.g., robot oscillates) that had not been explicitly accounted for in the initial prompt design.

  • 6 authors
·
Nov 2, 2023

Spacecraft Autonomous Decision-Planning for Collision Avoidance: a Reinforcement Learning Approach

The space environment around the Earth is becoming increasingly populated by both active spacecraft and space debris. To avoid potential collision events, significant improvements in Space Situational Awareness (SSA) activities and Collision Avoidance (CA) technologies are allowing the tracking and maneuvering of spacecraft with increasing accuracy and reliability. However, these procedures still largely involve a high level of human intervention to make the necessary decisions. For an increasingly complex space environment, this decision-making strategy is not likely to be sustainable. Therefore, it is important to successfully introduce higher levels of automation for key Space Traffic Management (STM) processes to ensure the level of reliability needed for navigating a large number of spacecraft. These processes range from collision risk detection to the identification of the appropriate action to take and the execution of avoidance maneuvers. This work proposes an implementation of autonomous CA decision-making capabilities on spacecraft based on Reinforcement Learning (RL) techniques. A novel methodology based on a Partially Observable Markov Decision Process (POMDP) framework is developed to train the Artificial Intelligence (AI) system on board the spacecraft, considering epistemic and aleatory uncertainties. The proposed framework considers imperfect monitoring information about the status of the debris in orbit and allows the AI system to effectively learn stochastic policies to perform accurate Collision Avoidance Maneuvers (CAMs). The objective is to successfully delegate the decision-making process for autonomously implementing a CAM to the spacecraft without human intervention. This approach would allow for a faster response in the decision-making process and for highly decentralized operations.

  • 3 authors
·
Oct 29, 2023

Safety in Embodied AI: A Survey of Risks, Attacks, and Defenses

Embodied Artificial Intelligence (Embodied AI) integrates perception, cognition, planning, and interaction into agents that operate in open-world, safety-critical environments. As these systems gain autonomy and enter domains such as transportation, healthcare, and industrial or assistive robotics, ensuring their safety becomes both technically challenging and socially indispensable. Unlike digital AI systems, embodied agents must act under uncertain sensing, incomplete knowledge, and dynamic human-robot interactions, where failures can directly lead to physical harm. This survey provides a comprehensive and structured review of safety research in embodied AI, examining attacks and defenses across the full embodied pipeline, from perception and cognition to planning, action and interaction, and agentic system. We introduce a multi-level taxonomy that unifies fragmented lines of work and connects embodied-specific safety findings with broader advances in vision, language, and multimodal foundation models. Our review synthesizes insights from over 400 papers spanning adversarial, backdoor, jailbreak, and hardware-level attacks; attack detection, safe training and robust inference; and risk-aware human-agent interaction. This analysis reveals several overlooked challenges, including the fragility of multimodal perception fusion, the instability of planning under jailbreak attacks, and the trustworthiness of human-agent interaction in open-ended scenarios. By organizing the field into a coherent framework and identifying critical research gaps, this survey provides a roadmap for building embodied agents that are not only capable and autonomous but also safe, robust, and reliable in real-world deployment.

  • 34 authors
·
Mar 27

RescueADI: Adaptive Disaster Interpretation in Remote Sensing Images with Autonomous Agents

Current methods for disaster scene interpretation in remote sensing images (RSIs) mostly focus on isolated tasks such as segmentation, detection, or visual question-answering (VQA). However, current interpretation methods often fail at tasks that require the combination of multiple perception methods and specialized tools. To fill this gap, this paper introduces Adaptive Disaster Interpretation (ADI), a novel task designed to solve requests by planning and executing multiple sequentially correlative interpretation tasks to provide a comprehensive analysis of disaster scenes. To facilitate research and application in this area, we present a new dataset named RescueADI, which contains high-resolution RSIs with annotations for three connected aspects: planning, perception, and recognition. The dataset includes 4,044 RSIs, 16,949 semantic masks, 14,483 object bounding boxes, and 13,424 interpretation requests across nine challenging request types. Moreover, we propose a new disaster interpretation method employing autonomous agents driven by large language models (LLMs) for task planning and execution, proving its efficacy in handling complex disaster interpretations. The proposed agent-based method solves various complex interpretation requests such as counting, area calculation, and path-finding without human intervention, which traditional single-task approaches cannot handle effectively. Experimental results on RescueADI demonstrate the feasibility of the proposed task and show that our method achieves an accuracy 9% higher than existing VQA methods, highlighting its advantages over conventional disaster interpretation approaches. The dataset will be publicly available.

  • 3 authors
·
Oct 17, 2024

Breaking Agents: Compromising Autonomous LLM Agents Through Malfunction Amplification

Recently, autonomous agents built on large language models (LLMs) have experienced significant development and are being deployed in real-world applications. These agents can extend the base LLM's capabilities in multiple ways. For example, a well-built agent using GPT-3.5-Turbo as its core can outperform the more advanced GPT-4 model by leveraging external components. More importantly, the usage of tools enables these systems to perform actions in the real world, moving from merely generating text to actively interacting with their environment. Given the agents' practical applications and their ability to execute consequential actions, it is crucial to assess potential vulnerabilities. Such autonomous systems can cause more severe damage than a standalone language model if compromised. While some existing research has explored harmful actions by LLM agents, our study approaches the vulnerability from a different perspective. We introduce a new type of attack that causes malfunctions by misleading the agent into executing repetitive or irrelevant actions. We conduct comprehensive evaluations using various attack methods, surfaces, and properties to pinpoint areas of susceptibility. Our experiments reveal that these attacks can induce failure rates exceeding 80\% in multiple scenarios. Through attacks on implemented and deployable agents in multi-agent scenarios, we accentuate the realistic risks associated with these vulnerabilities. To mitigate such attacks, we propose self-examination detection methods. However, our findings indicate these attacks are difficult to detect effectively using LLMs alone, highlighting the substantial risks associated with this vulnerability.

  • 7 authors
·
Jul 30, 2024

Toward Safe and Responsible AI Agents: A Three-Pillar Model for Transparency, Accountability, and Trustworthiness

This paper presents a conceptual and operational framework for developing and operating safe and trustworthy AI agents based on a Three-Pillar Model grounded in transparency, accountability, and trustworthiness. Building on prior work in Human-in-the-Loop systems, reinforcement learning, and collaborative AI, the framework defines an evolutionary path toward autonomous agents that balances increasing automation with appropriate human oversight. The paper argues that safe agent autonomy must be achieved through progressive validation, analogous to the staged development of autonomous driving, rather than through immediate full automation. Transparency and accountability are identified as foundational requirements for establishing user trust and for mitigating known risks in generative AI systems, including hallucinations, data bias, and goal misalignment, such as the inversion problem. The paper further describes three ongoing work streams supporting this framework: public deliberation on AI agents conducted by the Stanford Deliberative Democracy Lab, cross-industry collaboration through the Safe AI Agent Consortium, and the development of open tooling for an agent operating environment aligned with the Three-Pillar Model. Together, these contributions provide both conceptual clarity and practical guidance for enabling the responsible evolution of AI agents that operate transparently, remain aligned with human values, and sustain societal trust.

  • 3 authors
·
Jan 8

Rethinking Autonomy: Preventing Failures in AI-Driven Software Engineering

The integration of Large Language Models (LLMs) into software engineering has revolutionized code generation, enabling unprecedented productivity through promptware and autonomous AI agents. However, this transformation introduces significant risks, including insecure code generation, hallucinated outputs, irreversible actions, and a lack of transparency and accountability. Incidents like the Replit database deletion underscore the urgent need for robust safety and governance mechanisms. This paper comprehensively analyzes the inherent challenges of LLM-assisted code generation, such as vulnerability inheritance, overtrust, misinterpretation, and the absence of standardized validation and rollback protocols. To address these, we propose the SAFE-AI Framework, a holistic approach emphasizing Safety, Auditability, Feedback, and Explainability. The framework integrates guardrails, sandboxing, runtime verification, risk-aware logging, human-in-the-loop systems, and explainable AI techniques to mitigate risks while fostering trust and compliance. We introduce a novel taxonomy of AI behaviors categorizing suggestive, generative, autonomous, and destructive actions to guide risk assessment and oversight. Additionally, we identify open problems, including the lack of standardized benchmarks for code specific hallucinations and autonomy levels, and propose future research directions for hybrid verification, semantic guardrails, and proactive governance tools. Through detailed comparisons of autonomy control, prompt engineering, explainability, and governance frameworks, this paper provides a roadmap for responsible AI integration in software engineering, aligning with emerging regulations like the EU AI Act and Canada's AIDA to ensure safe, transparent, and accountable AI-driven development.

  • 2 authors
·
Aug 15, 2025

MobileSafetyBench: Evaluating Safety of Autonomous Agents in Mobile Device Control

Autonomous agents powered by large language models (LLMs) show promising potential in assistive tasks across various domains, including mobile device control. As these agents interact directly with personal information and device settings, ensuring their safe and reliable behavior is crucial to prevent undesirable outcomes. However, no benchmark exists for standardized evaluation of the safety of mobile device-control agents. In this work, we introduce MobileSafetyBench, a benchmark designed to evaluate the safety of device-control agents within a realistic mobile environment based on Android emulators. We develop a diverse set of tasks involving interactions with various mobile applications, including messaging and banking applications. To clearly evaluate safety apart from general capabilities, we design separate tasks measuring safety and tasks evaluating helpfulness. The safety tasks challenge agents with managing potential risks prevalent in daily life and include tests to evaluate robustness against indirect prompt injections. Our experiments demonstrate that while baseline agents, based on state-of-the-art LLMs, perform well in executing helpful tasks, they show poor performance in safety tasks. To mitigate these safety concerns, we propose a prompting method that encourages agents to prioritize safety considerations. While this method shows promise in promoting safer behaviors, there is still considerable room for improvement to fully earn user trust. This highlights the urgent need for continued research to develop more robust safety mechanisms in mobile environments. We open-source our benchmark at: https://mobilesafetybench.github.io/.

  • 5 authors
·
Oct 22, 2024

CARMA: Context-Aware Runtime Reconfiguration for Energy-Efficient Sensor Fusion

Autonomous systems (AS) are systems that can adapt and change their behavior in response to unanticipated events and include systems such as aerial drones, autonomous vehicles, and ground/aquatic robots. AS require a wide array of sensors, deep-learning models, and powerful hardware platforms to perceive and safely operate in real-time. However, in many contexts, some sensing modalities negatively impact perception while increasing the system's overall energy consumption. Since AS are often energy-constrained edge devices, energy-efficient sensor fusion methods have been proposed. However, existing methods either fail to adapt to changing scenario conditions or to optimize energy efficiency system-wide. We propose CARMA: a context-aware sensor fusion approach that uses context to dynamically reconfigure the computation flow on a Field-Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) at runtime. By clock-gating unused sensors and model sub-components, CARMA significantly reduces the energy used by a multi-sensory object detector without compromising performance. We use a Deep-learning Processor Unit (DPU) based reconfiguration approach to minimize the latency of model reconfiguration. We evaluate multiple context-identification strategies, propose a novel system-wide energy-performance joint optimization, and evaluate scenario-specific perception performance. Across challenging real-world sensing contexts, CARMA outperforms state-of-the-art methods with up to 1.3x speedup and 73% lower energy consumption.

  • 7 authors
·
Jun 27, 2023

The Path Ahead for Agentic AI: Challenges and Opportunities

The evolution of Large Language Models (LLMs) from passive text generators to autonomous, goal-driven systems represents a fundamental shift in artificial intelligence. This chapter examines the emergence of agentic AI systems that integrate planning, memory, tool use, and iterative reasoning to operate autonomously in complex environments. We trace the architectural progression from statistical models to transformer-based systems, identifying capabilities that enable agentic behavior: long-range reasoning, contextual awareness, and adaptive decision-making. The chapter provides three contributions: (1) a synthesis of how LLM capabilities extend toward agency through reasoning-action-reflection loops; (2) an integrative framework describing core components perception, memory, planning, and tool execution that bridge LLMs with autonomous behavior; (3) a critical assessment of applications and persistent challenges in safety, alignment, reliability, and sustainability. Unlike existing surveys, we focus on the architectural transition from language understanding to autonomous action, emphasizing the technical gaps that must be resolved before deployment. We identify critical research priorities, including verifiable planning, scalable multi-agent coordination, persistent memory architectures, and governance frameworks. Responsible advancement requires simultaneous progress in technical robustness, interpretability, and ethical safeguards to realize potential while mitigating risks of misalignment and unintended consequences.

  • 6 authors
·
Jan 6

AgentSpec: Customizable Runtime Enforcement for Safe and Reliable LLM Agents

Agents built on LLMs are increasingly deployed across diverse domains, automating complex decision-making and task execution. However, their autonomy introduces safety risks, including security vulnerabilities, legal violations, and unintended harmful actions. Existing mitigation methods, such as model-based safeguards and early enforcement strategies, fall short in robustness, interpretability, and adaptability. To address these challenges, we propose AgentSpec, a lightweight domain-specific language for specifying and enforcing runtime constraints on LLM agents. With AgentSpec, users define structured rules that incorporate triggers, predicates, and enforcement mechanisms, ensuring agents operate within predefined safety boundaries. We implement AgentSpec across multiple domains, including code execution, embodied agents, and autonomous driving, demonstrating its adaptability and effectiveness. Our evaluation shows that AgentSpec successfully prevents unsafe executions in over 90% of code agent cases, eliminates all hazardous actions in embodied agent tasks, and enforces 100% compliance by autonomous vehicles (AVs). Despite its strong safety guarantees, AgentSpec remains computationally lightweight, with overheads in milliseconds. By combining interpretability, modularity, and efficiency, AgentSpec provides a practical and scalable solution for enforcing LLM agent safety across diverse applications. We also automate the generation of rules using LLMs and assess their effectiveness. Our evaluation shows that the rules generated by OpenAI o1 achieve a precision of 95.56% and recall of 70.96% for embodied agents, successfully identify 87.26% of the risky code, and prevent AVs from breaking laws in 5 out of 8 scenarios.

  • 3 authors
·
Mar 24, 2025

Unsupervised Anomaly Detection for Autonomous Robots via Mahalanobis SVDD with Audio-IMU Fusion

Reliable anomaly detection is essential for ensuring the safety of autonomous robots, particularly when conventional detection systems based on vision or LiDAR become unreliable in adverse or unpredictable conditions. In such scenarios, alternative sensing modalities are needed to provide timely and robust feedback. To this end, we explore the use of audio and inertial measurement unit (IMU) sensors to detect underlying anomalies in autonomous mobile robots, such as collisions and internal mechanical faults. Furthermore, to address the challenge of limited labeled anomaly data, we propose an unsupervised anomaly detection framework based on Mahalanobis Support Vector Data Description (M-SVDD). In contrast to conventional SVDD methods that rely on Euclidean distance and assume isotropic feature distributions, our approach employs the Mahalanobis distance to adaptively scale feature dimensions and capture inter-feature correlations, enabling more expressive decision boundaries. In addition, a reconstruction-based auxiliary branch is introduced to preserve feature diversity and prevent representation collapse, further enhancing the robustness of anomaly detection. Extensive experiments on a collected mobile robot dataset and four public datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method, as shown in the video https://youtu.be/yh1tn6DDD4A. Code and dataset are available at https://github.com/jamesyang7/M-SVDD.

  • 6 authors
·
May 9, 2025

ESAA: Event Sourcing for Autonomous Agents in LLM-Based Software Engineering

Autonomous agents based on Large Language Models (LLMs) have evolved from reactive assistants to systems capable of planning, executing actions via tools, and iterating over environment observations. However, they remain vulnerable to structural limitations: lack of native state, context degradation over long horizons, and the gap between probabilistic generation and deterministic execution requirements. This paper presents the ESAA (Event Sourcing for Autonomous Agents) architecture, which separates the agent's cognitive intention from the project's state mutation, inspired by the Event Sourcing pattern. In ESAA, agents emit only structured intentions in validated JSON (agent.result or issue.report); a deterministic orchestrator validates, persists events in an append-only log (activity.jsonl), applies file-writing effects, and projects a verifiable materialized view (roadmap.json). The proposal incorporates boundary contracts (AGENT_CONTRACT.yaml), metaprompting profiles (PARCER), and replay verification with hashing (esaa verify), ensuring the immutability of completed tasks and forensic traceability. Two case studies validate the architecture: (i) a landing page project (9 tasks, 49 events, single-agent composition) and (ii) a clinical dashboard system (50 tasks, 86 events, 4 concurrent agents across 8 phases), both concluding with run.status=success and verify_status=ok. The multi-agent case study demonstrates real concurrent orchestration with heterogeneous LLMs (Claude Sonnet 4.6, Codex GPT-5, Antigravity/Gemini 3 Pro, and Claude Opus 4.6), providing empirical evidence of the architecture's scalability beyond single-agent scenarios.

  • 1 authors
·
Feb 25

Between Help and Harm: An Evaluation of Mental Health Crisis Handling by LLMs

Large language model-powered chatbots have transformed how people seek information, especially in high-stakes contexts like mental health. Despite their support capabilities, safe detection and response to crises such as suicidal ideation and self-harm are still unclear, hindered by the lack of unified crisis taxonomies and clinical evaluation standards. We address this by creating: (1) a taxonomy of six crisis categories; (2) a dataset of over 2,000 inputs from 12 mental health datasets, classified into these categories; and (3) a clinical response assessment protocol. We also use LLMs to identify crisis inputs and audit five models for response safety and appropriateness. First, we built a clinical-informed crisis taxonomy and evaluation protocol. Next, we curated 2,252 relevant examples from over 239,000 user inputs, then tested three LLMs for automatic classification. In addition, we evaluated five models for the appropriateness of their responses to a user's crisis, graded on a 5-point Likert scale from harmful (1) to appropriate (5). While some models respond reliably to explicit crises, risks still exist. Many outputs, especially in self-harm and suicidal categories, are inappropriate or unsafe. Different models perform variably; some, like gpt-5-nano and deepseek-v3.2-exp, have low harm rates, but others, such as gpt-4o-mini and grok-4-fast, generate more unsafe responses. All models struggle with indirect signals, default replies, and context misalignment. These results highlight the urgent need for better safeguards, crisis detection, and context-aware responses in LLMs. They also show that alignment and safety practices, beyond scale, are crucial for reliable crisis support. Our taxonomy, datasets, and evaluation methods support ongoing AI mental health research, aiming to reduce harm and protect vulnerable users.

  • 8 authors
·
Apr 7

Onboard Mission Replanning for Adaptive Cooperative Multi-Robot Systems

Cooperative autonomous robotic systems have significant potential for executing complex multi-task missions across space, air, ground, and maritime domains. But they commonly operate in remote, dynamic and hazardous environments, requiring rapid in-mission adaptation without reliance on fragile or slow communication links to centralised compute. Fast, on-board replanning algorithms are therefore needed to enhance resilience. Reinforcement Learning shows strong promise for efficiently solving mission planning tasks when formulated as Travelling Salesperson Problems (TSPs), but existing methods: 1) are unsuitable for replanning, where agents do not start at a single location; 2) do not allow cooperation between agents; 3) are unable to model tasks with variable durations; or 4) lack practical considerations for on-board deployment. Here we define the Cooperative Mission Replanning Problem as a novel variant of multiple TSP with adaptations to overcome these issues, and develop a new encoder/decoder-based model using Graph Attention Networks and Attention Models to solve it effectively and efficiently. Using a simple example of cooperative drones, we show our replanner consistently (90% of the time) maintains performance within 10% of the state-of-the-art LKH3 heuristic solver, whilst running 85-370 times faster on a Raspberry Pi. This work paves the way for increased resilience in autonomous multi-agent systems.

  • 6 authors
·
Nov 12, 2025

UAVs Meet Agentic AI: A Multidomain Survey of Autonomous Aerial Intelligence and Agentic UAVs

Agentic UAVs represent a new frontier in autonomous aerial intelligence, integrating perception, decision-making, memory, and collaborative planning to operate adaptively in complex, real-world environments. Driven by recent advances in Agentic AI, these systems surpass traditional UAVs by exhibiting goal-driven behavior, contextual reasoning, and interactive autonomy. We provide a comprehensive foundation for understanding the architectural components and enabling technologies that distinguish Agentic UAVs from traditional autonomous UAVs. Furthermore, a detailed comparative analysis highlights advancements in autonomy with AI agents, learning, and mission flexibility. This study explores seven high-impact application domains precision agriculture, construction & mining, disaster response, environmental monitoring, infrastructure inspection, logistics, security, and wildlife conservation, illustrating the broad societal value of agentic aerial intelligence. Furthermore, we identify key challenges in technical constraints, regulatory limitations, and data-model reliability, and we present emerging solutions across hardware innovation, learning architectures, and human-AI interaction. Finally, a future roadmap is proposed, outlining pathways toward self-evolving aerial ecosystems, system-level collaboration, and sustainable, equitable deployments. This survey establishes a foundational framework for the future development, deployment, and governance of agentic aerial systems (Agentic UAVs) across diverse societal and industrial domains.

  • 3 authors
·
Jun 7, 2025

Agent2Agent Threats in Safety-Critical LLM Assistants: A Human-Centric Taxonomy

The integration of Large Language Model (LLM)-based conversational agents into vehicles creates novel security challenges at the intersection of agentic AI, automotive safety, and inter-agent communication. As these intelligent assistants coordinate with external services via protocols such as Google's Agent-to-Agent (A2A), they establish attack surfaces where manipulations can propagate through natural language payloads, potentially causing severe consequences ranging from driver distraction to unauthorized vehicle control. Existing AI security frameworks, while foundational, lack the rigorous "separation of concerns" standard in safety-critical systems engineering by co-mingling the concepts of what is being protected (assets) with how it is attacked (attack paths). This paper addresses this methodological gap by proposing a threat modeling framework called AgentHeLLM (Agent Hazard Exploration for LLM Assistants) that formally separates asset identification from attack path analysis. We introduce a human-centric asset taxonomy derived from harm-oriented "victim modeling" and inspired by the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and a formal graph-based model that distinguishes poison paths (malicious data propagation) from trigger paths (activation actions). We demonstrate the framework's practical applicability through an open-source attack path suggestion tool AgentHeLLM Attack Path Generator that automates multi-stage threat discovery using a bi-level search strategy.

  • 4 authors
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Feb 4

A Survey of Data Agents: Emerging Paradigm or Overstated Hype?

The rapid advancement of large language models (LLMs) has spurred the emergence of data agents--autonomous systems designed to orchestrate Data + AI ecosystems for tackling complex data-related tasks. However, the term "data agent" currently suffers from terminological ambiguity and inconsistent adoption, conflating simple query responders with sophisticated autonomous architectures. This terminological ambiguity fosters mismatched user expectations, accountability challenges, and barriers to industry growth. Inspired by the SAE J3016 standard for driving automation, this survey introduces the first systematic hierarchical taxonomy for data agents, comprising six levels that delineate and trace progressive shifts in autonomy, from manual operations (L0) to a vision of generative, fully autonomous data agents (L5), thereby clarifying capability boundaries and responsibility allocation. Through this lens, we offer a structured review of existing research arranged by increasing autonomy, encompassing specialized data agents for data management, preparation, and analysis, alongside emerging efforts toward versatile, comprehensive systems with enhanced autonomy. We further analyze critical evolutionary leaps and technical gaps for advancing data agents, especially the ongoing L2-to-L3 transition, where data agents evolve from procedural execution to autonomous orchestration. Finally, we conclude with a forward-looking roadmap, envisioning the advent of proactive, generative data agents.

  • 25 authors
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Oct 27, 2025 1

Just Ask: Curious Code Agents Reveal System Prompts in Frontier LLMs

Autonomous code agents built on large language models are reshaping software and AI development through tool use, long-horizon reasoning, and self-directed interaction. However, this autonomy introduces a previously unrecognized security risk: agentic interaction fundamentally expands the LLM attack surface, enabling systematic probing and recovery of hidden system prompts that guide model behavior. We identify system prompt extraction as an emergent vulnerability intrinsic to code agents and present \textsc{JustAsk}, a self-evolving framework that autonomously discovers effective extraction strategies through interaction alone. Unlike prior prompt-engineering or dataset-based attacks, JustAsk requires no handcrafted prompts, labeled supervision, or privileged access beyond standard user interaction. It formulates extraction as an online exploration problem, using Upper Confidence Bound-based strategy selection and a hierarchical skill space spanning atomic probes and high-level orchestration. These skills exploit imperfect system-instruction generalization and inherent tensions between helpfulness and safety. Evaluated on 41 black-box commercial models across multiple providers, JustAsk consistently achieves full or near-complete system prompt recovery, revealing recurring design- and architecture-level vulnerabilities. Our results expose system prompts as a critical yet largely unprotected attack surface in modern agent systems.

  • 8 authors
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Jan 28

The Blind Spot of Agent Safety: How Benign User Instructions Expose Critical Vulnerabilities in Computer-Use Agents

Computer-use agents (CUAs) can now autonomously complete complex tasks in real digital environments, but when misled, they can also be used to automate harmful actions programmatically. Existing safety evaluations largely target explicit threats such as misuse and prompt injection, but overlook a subtle yet critical setting where user instructions are entirely benign and harm arises from the task context or execution outcome. We introduce OS-BLIND, a benchmark that evaluates CUAs under unintended attack conditions, comprising 300 human-crafted tasks across 12 categories, 8 applications, and 2 threat clusters: environment-embedded threats and agent-initiated harms. Our evaluation on frontier models and agentic frameworks reveals that most CUAs exceed 90% attack success rate (ASR), and even the safety-aligned Claude 4.5 Sonnet reaches 73.0% ASR. More interestingly, this vulnerability becomes even more severe, with ASR rising from 73.0% to 92.7% when Claude 4.5 Sonnet is deployed in multi-agent systems. Our analysis further shows that existing safety defenses provide limited protection when user instructions are benign. Safety alignment primarily activates within the first few steps and rarely re-engages during subsequent execution. In multi-agent systems, decomposed subtasks obscure the harmful intent from the model, causing safety-aligned models to fail. We will release our OS-BLIND to encourage the broader research community to further investigate and address these safety challenges.

ESARBench: A Benchmark for Agentic UAV Embodied Search and Rescue

The rapid advancement of Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) has empowered Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) with exceptional capabilities in spatial reasoning, semantic understanding, and complex decision-making, making them inherently suited for UAV Search and Rescue (SAR). However, existing UAV SAR research is dominated by traditional vision and path-planning methods and lacks a comprehensive and unified benchmark for embodied agents. To bridge this gap, we first propose the novel task of Embodied Search and Rescue (ESAR), which requires aerial agents to autonomously explore complex environments, identify rescue clues, and reason about victim locations to execute informed decision-making. Additionally, we present ESARBench, the first comprehensive benchmark designed to evaluate MLLM-driven UAV agents in highly realistic SAR scenarios. Leveraging Unreal Engine 5 and AirSim, we construct four high-fidelity, large-scale open environments mapped directly from real-world Geographic Information System (GIS) data to ensure photorealistic landscapes. To rigorously simulate actual rescue operations, our benchmark incorporates dynamic variables including weather conditions, time of day, and stochastic clue placement. Furthermore, we create a dataset of 600 tasks modeled after real-world rescue cases and propose a robust set of evaluation metrics. We evaluate diverse baselines, ranging from traditional heuristics to advanced ground and aerial MLLM-based ObjectNav agents. Experimental results highlight the challenges in ESAR, revealing critical bottlenecks in spatial memory, aerial adaptation, and the trade-off between search efficiency and flight safety. We hope ESARBench serves as a valuable resource to advance research on Embodied Search and Rescue domain. Source code and project page: https://4amgodvzx.github.io/ESAR.github.io.

  • 4 authors
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May 1 2

Autonomous Oil Spill Response Through Liquid Neural Trajectory Modeling and Coordinated Marine Robotics

Marine oil spills pose grave environmental and economic risks, threatening marine ecosystems, coastlines, and dependent industries. Predicting and managing oil spill trajectories is highly complex, due to the interplay of physical, chemical, and environmental factors such as wind, currents, and temperature, which makes timely and effective response challenging. Accurate real-time trajectory forecasting and coordinated mitigation are vital for minimizing the impact of these disasters. This study introduces an integrated framework combining a multi-agent swarm robotics system built on the MOOS-IvP platform with Liquid Time-Constant Neural Networks (LTCNs). The proposed system fuses adaptive machine learning with autonomous marine robotics, enabling real-time prediction, dynamic tracking, and rapid response to evolving oil spills. By leveraging LTCNs--well-suited for modeling complex, time-dependent processes--the framework achieves real-time, high-accuracy forecasts of spill movement. Swarm intelligence enables decentralized, scalable, and resilient decision-making among robot agents, enhancing collective monitoring and containment efforts. Our approach was validated using data from the Deepwater Horizon spill, where the LTC-RK4 model achieved 0.96 spatial accuracy, surpassing LSTM approaches by 23%. The integration of advanced neural modeling with autonomous, coordinated robotics demonstrates substantial improvements in prediction precision, flexibility, and operational scalability. Ultimately, this research advances the state-of-the-art for sustainable, autonomous oil spill management and environmental protection by enhancing both trajectory prediction and response coordination.

  • 3 authors
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Aug 17, 2025

Enhancing Traffic Incident Management with Large Language Models: A Hybrid Machine Learning Approach for Severity Classification

This research showcases the innovative integration of Large Language Models into machine learning workflows for traffic incident management, focusing on the classification of incident severity using accident reports. By leveraging features generated by modern language models alongside conventional data extracted from incident reports, our research demonstrates improvements in the accuracy of severity classification across several machine learning algorithms. Our contributions are threefold. First, we present an extensive comparison of various machine learning models paired with multiple large language models for feature extraction, aiming to identify the optimal combinations for accurate incident severity classification. Second, we contrast traditional feature engineering pipelines with those enhanced by language models, showcasing the superiority of language-based feature engineering in processing unstructured text. Third, our study illustrates how merging baseline features from accident reports with language-based features can improve the severity classification accuracy. This comprehensive approach not only advances the field of incident management but also highlights the cross-domain application potential of our methodology, particularly in contexts requiring the prediction of event outcomes from unstructured textual data or features translated into textual representation. Specifically, our novel methodology was applied to three distinct datasets originating from the United States, the United Kingdom, and Queensland, Australia. This cross-continental application underlines the robustness of our approach, suggesting its potential for widespread adoption in improving incident management processes globally.

  • 4 authors
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Mar 20, 2024

UniSim: A Neural Closed-Loop Sensor Simulator

Rigorously testing autonomy systems is essential for making safe self-driving vehicles (SDV) a reality. It requires one to generate safety critical scenarios beyond what can be collected safely in the world, as many scenarios happen rarely on public roads. To accurately evaluate performance, we need to test the SDV on these scenarios in closed-loop, where the SDV and other actors interact with each other at each timestep. Previously recorded driving logs provide a rich resource to build these new scenarios from, but for closed loop evaluation, we need to modify the sensor data based on the new scene configuration and the SDV's decisions, as actors might be added or removed and the trajectories of existing actors and the SDV will differ from the original log. In this paper, we present UniSim, a neural sensor simulator that takes a single recorded log captured by a sensor-equipped vehicle and converts it into a realistic closed-loop multi-sensor simulation. UniSim builds neural feature grids to reconstruct both the static background and dynamic actors in the scene, and composites them together to simulate LiDAR and camera data at new viewpoints, with actors added or removed and at new placements. To better handle extrapolated views, we incorporate learnable priors for dynamic objects, and leverage a convolutional network to complete unseen regions. Our experiments show UniSim can simulate realistic sensor data with small domain gap on downstream tasks. With UniSim, we demonstrate closed-loop evaluation of an autonomy system on safety-critical scenarios as if it were in the real world.

  • 7 authors
·
Aug 3, 2023

LAMP 2.0: A Robust Multi-Robot SLAM System for Operation in Challenging Large-Scale Underground Environments

Search and rescue with a team of heterogeneous mobile robots in unknown and large-scale underground environments requires high-precision localization and mapping. This crucial requirement is faced with many challenges in complex and perceptually-degraded subterranean environments, as the onboard perception system is required to operate in off-nominal conditions (poor visibility due to darkness and dust, rugged and muddy terrain, and the presence of self-similar and ambiguous scenes). In a disaster response scenario and in the absence of prior information about the environment, robots must rely on noisy sensor data and perform Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM) to build a 3D map of the environment and localize themselves and potential survivors. To that end, this paper reports on a multi-robot SLAM system developed by team CoSTAR in the context of the DARPA Subterranean Challenge. We extend our previous work, LAMP, by incorporating a single-robot front-end interface that is adaptable to different odometry sources and lidar configurations, a scalable multi-robot front-end to support inter- and intra-robot loop closure detection for large scale environments and multi-robot teams, and a robust back-end equipped with an outlier-resilient pose graph optimization based on Graduated Non-Convexity. We provide a detailed ablation study on the multi-robot front-end and back-end, and assess the overall system performance in challenging real-world datasets collected across mines, power plants, and caves in the United States. We also release our multi-robot back-end datasets (and the corresponding ground truth), which can serve as challenging benchmarks for large-scale underground SLAM.

  • 12 authors
·
May 25, 2022

From Words to Collisions: LLM-Guided Evaluation and Adversarial Generation of Safety-Critical Driving Scenarios

Ensuring the safety of autonomous vehicles requires virtual scenario-based testing, which depends on the robust evaluation and generation of safety-critical scenarios. So far, researchers have used scenario-based testing frameworks that rely heavily on handcrafted scenarios as safety metrics. To reduce the effort of human interpretation and overcome the limited scalability of these approaches, we combine Large Language Models (LLMs) with structured scenario parsing and prompt engineering to automatically evaluate and generate safety-critical driving scenarios. We introduce Cartesian and Ego-centric prompt strategies for scenario evaluation, and an adversarial generation module that modifies trajectories of risk-inducing vehicles (ego-attackers) to create critical scenarios. We validate our approach using a 2D simulation framework and multiple pre-trained LLMs. The results show that the evaluation module effectively detects collision scenarios and infers scenario safety. Meanwhile, the new generation module identifies high-risk agents and synthesizes realistic, safety-critical scenarios. We conclude that an LLM equipped with domain-informed prompting techniques can effectively evaluate and generate safety-critical driving scenarios, reducing dependence on handcrafted metrics. We release our open-source code and scenarios at: https://github.com/TUM-AVS/From-Words-to-Collisions.

  • 5 authors
·
Feb 4, 2025 1

LiSA: Lifelong Safety Adaptation via Conservative Policy Induction

As AI agents move from chat interfaces to systems that read private data, call tools, and execute multi-step workflows, guardrails become a last line of defense against concrete deployment harms. In these settings, guardrail failures are no longer merely answer-quality errors: they can leak secrets, authorize unsafe actions, or block legitimate work. The hardest failures are often contextual: whether an action is acceptable depends on local privacy norms, organizational policies, and user expectations that resist pre-deployment specification. This creates a practical gap: guardrails must adapt to their own operating environments, yet deployment feedback is typically limited to sparse, noisy user-reported failures, and repeated fine-tuning is often impractical. To address this gap, we propose LiSA (Lifelong Safety Adaptation), a conservative policy induction framework that improves a fixed base guardrail through structured memory. LiSA converts occasional failures into reusable policy abstractions so that sparse reports can generalize beyond individual cases, adds conflict-aware local rules to prevent overgeneralization in mixed-label contexts, and applies evidence-aware confidence gating via a posterior lower bound, so that memory reuse scales with accumulated evidence rather than empirical accuracy alone. Across PrivacyLens+, ConFaide+, and AgentHarm, LiSA consistently outperforms strong memory-based baselines under sparse feedback, remains robust under noisy user feedback even at 20% label-flip rates, and pushes the latency--performance frontier beyond backbone model scaling. Ultimately, LiSA offers a practical path to secure AI agents against the unpredictable long tail of real-world edge risks.

google Google
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May 13 2

Enforcing Temporal Constraints for LLM Agents

LLM-based agents are deployed in safety-critical applications, yet current guardrail systems fail to prevent violations of temporal safety policies, requirements that govern the ordering and sequencing of agent actions. For instance, agents may access sensitive data before authenticating users or process refunds to unauthorized payment methods, violations that require reasoning about sequences of action rather than an individual action. Existing guardrails rely on imprecise natural language instructions or post-hoc monitoring, and provide no formal guarantees that agents will satisfy temporal constraints. We present Agent-C, a novel framework that provides run-time guarantees ensuring LLM agents adhere to formal temporal safety properties. Agent-C introduces a domain-specific language for expressing temporal properties (e.g., authenticate before accessing data), translates specifications to first-order logic, and uses SMT solving to detect non-compliant agent actions during token generation. When the LLM attempts to generate a non-compliant tool call, Agent-C leverages constrained generation techniques to ensure that every action generated by the LLM complies with the specification, and to generate a compliant alternative to a non-compliant agent action. We evaluate Agent-C across two real-world applications: retail customer service and airline ticket reservation system, and multiple language models (open and closed-source). Our results demonstrate that Agent-C achieves perfect safety (100% conformance, 0% harm), while improving task utility compared to state-of-the-art guardrails and unrestricted agents. On SoTA closed-source models, Agent-C improves conformance (77.4% to 100% for Claude Sonnet 4.5 and 83.7% to 100% for GPT-5), while simultaneously increasing utility (71.8% to 75.2% and 66.1% to 70.6%, respectively), representing a new SoTA frontier for reliable agentic reasoning.

  • 6 authors
·
Dec 25, 2025

On-Policy Self-Evolution via Failure Trajectories for Agentic Safety Alignment

Tool-using LLM agents fail through trajectories rather than only final responses, as they may execute unsafe tool calls, follow injected instructions, comply with harmful requests, or over-refuse benign tasks despite producing a seemingly safe answer. Existing safety-alignment signals are largely response-level or off-policy, and often incur a safety-utility trade-off: improving agent safety comes at the cost of degraded task performance. Such sparse and single-objective rewards severely limit real-world usability. To bridge this gap, we propose FATE, an on-policy self-evolving framework that transforms verifier-scored failures into repair supervision without expert demonstrations. For each failure, the same policy proposes repair candidates, which are then re-scored by verifiers and filtered across security, utility, over-refusal control, and trajectory validity. This dense trajectory-level information is then used as a supervision signal for agent self-evolution. During this process, we further introduce Pareto-Front Policy Optimization (PFPO), combining supervised warmup with Pareto-aware policy optimization to preserve safety-utility trade-offs. Experiments on AgentDojo, AgentHarm, and ATBench show that FATE improves safety across different models and scales while preserving useful behavior. Compared with strong baselines, FATE reduces attack success rate by 33.5%, harmful compliance by 82.6%, and improves external trajectory-safety diagnosis by 6.5%. These results suggest that failed trajectories can provide structured repair supervision for safer self-evolving agents.

  • 3 authors
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May 11

Guardians of the Agentic System: Preventing Many Shots Jailbreak with Agentic System

The autonomous AI agents using large language models can create undeniable values in all span of the society but they face security threats from adversaries that warrants immediate protective solutions because trust and safety issues arise. Considering the many-shot jailbreaking and deceptive alignment as some of the main advanced attacks, that cannot be mitigated by the static guardrails used during the supervised training, points out a crucial research priority for real world robustness. The combination of static guardrails in dynamic multi-agent system fails to defend against those attacks. We intend to enhance security for LLM-based agents through the development of new evaluation frameworks which identify and counter threats for safe operational deployment. Our work uses three examination methods to detect rogue agents through a Reverse Turing Test and analyze deceptive alignment through multi-agent simulations and develops an anti-jailbreaking system by testing it with GEMINI 1.5 pro and llama-3.3-70B, deepseek r1 models using tool-mediated adversarial scenarios. The detection capabilities are strong such as 94\% accuracy for GEMINI 1.5 pro yet the system suffers persistent vulnerabilities when under long attacks as prompt length increases attack success rates (ASR) and diversity metrics become ineffective in prediction while revealing multiple complex system faults. The findings demonstrate the necessity of adopting flexible security systems based on active monitoring that can be performed by the agents themselves together with adaptable interventions by system admin as the current models can create vulnerabilities that can lead to the unreliable and vulnerable system. So, in our work, we try to address such situations and propose a comprehensive framework to counteract the security issues.

  • 6 authors
·
Feb 23, 2025 2

A Benchmark for Evaluating Outcome-Driven Constraint Violations in Autonomous AI Agents

As autonomous AI agents are increasingly deployed in high-stakes environments, ensuring their safety and alignment with human values has become a paramount concern. Current safety benchmarks primarily evaluate whether agents refuse explicitly harmful instructions or whether they can maintain procedural compliance in complex tasks. However, there is a lack of benchmarks designed to capture emergent forms of outcome-driven constraint violations, which arise when agents pursue goal optimization under strong performance incentives while deprioritizing ethical, legal, or safety constraints over multiple steps in realistic production settings. To address this gap, we introduce a new benchmark comprising 40 distinct scenarios. Each scenario presents a task that requires multi-step actions, and the agent's performance is tied to a specific Key Performance Indicator (KPI). Each scenario features Mandated (instruction-commanded) and Incentivized (KPI-pressure-driven) variations to distinguish between obedience and emergent misalignment. Across 12 state-of-the-art large language models, we observe outcome-driven constraint violations ranging from 1.3% to 71.4%, with 9 of the 12 evaluated models exhibiting misalignment rates between 30% and 50%. Strikingly, we find that superior reasoning capability does not inherently ensure safety; for instance, Gemini-3-Pro-Preview, one of the most capable models evaluated, exhibits the highest violation rate at 71.4%, frequently escalating to severe misconduct to satisfy KPIs. Furthermore, we observe significant "deliberative misalignment", where the models that power the agents recognize their actions as unethical during separate evaluation. These results emphasize the critical need for more realistic agentic-safety training before deployment to mitigate their risks in the real world.

  • 6 authors
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Dec 23, 2025

LLM-Based Generalizable Hierarchical Task Planning and Execution for Heterogeneous Robot Teams with Event-Driven Replanning

This paper introduces CoMuRoS (Collaborative Multi-Robot System), a generalizable hierarchical architecture for heterogeneous robot teams that unifies centralized deliberation with decentralized execution, and supports event-driven replanning. A Task Manager LLM interprets natural-language goals, classifies tasks, and allocates subtasks using static rules plus dynamic contexts (task, history, robot and task status, and events).Each robot runs a local LLM that composes executable Python code from primitive skills (ROS2 nodes, policies), while onboard perception (VLMs/image processing) continuously monitors events and classifies them into relevant or irrelevant to the task. Task failures or user intent changes trigger replanning, allowing robots to assist teammates, resume tasks, or request human help. Hardware studies demonstrate autonomous recovery from disruptive events, filtering of irrelevant distractions, and tightly coordinated transport with emergent human-robot cooperation (e.g., multirobot collaborative object recovery success rate: 9/10, coordinated transport: 8/8, human-assisted recovery: 5/5).Simulation studies show intention-aware replanning. A curated textual benchmark spanning 22 scenarios (3 tasks each, around 20 robots) evaluates task allocation, classification, IoU, executability, and correctness, with high average scores (e.g., correctness up to 0.91) across multiple LLMs, a separate replanning set (5 scenarios) achieves 1.0 correctness. Compared with prior LLM-based systems, CoMuRoS uniquely demonstrates runtime, event-driven replanning on physical robots, delivering robust, flexible multi-robot and human-robot collaboration.

  • 4 authors
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Nov 27, 2025

Agentic Artificial Intelligence (AI): Architectures, Taxonomies, and Evaluation of Large Language Model Agents

Artificial Intelligence is moving from models that only generate text to Agentic AI, where systems behave as autonomous entities that can perceive, reason, plan, and act. Large Language Models (LLMs) are no longer used only as passive knowledge engines but as cognitive controllers that combine memory, tool use, and feedback from their environment to pursue extended goals. This shift already supports the automation of complex workflows in software engineering, scientific discovery, and web navigation, yet the variety of emerging designs, from simple single loop agents to hierarchical multi agent systems, makes the landscape hard to navigate. In this paper, we investigate architectures and propose a unified taxonomy that breaks agents into Perception, Brain, Planning, Action, Tool Use, and Collaboration. We use this lens to describe the move from linear reasoning procedures to native inference time reasoning models, and the transition from fixed API calls to open standards like the Model Context Protocol (MCP) and Native Computer Use. We also group the environments in which these agents operate, including digital operating systems, embodied robotics, and other specialized domains, and we review current evaluation practices. Finally, we highlight open challenges, such as hallucination in action, infinite loops, and prompt injection, and outline future research directions toward more robust and reliable autonomous systems.

  • 3 authors
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Jan 18

Human Society-Inspired Approaches to Agentic AI Security: The 4C Framework

AI is moving from domain-specific autonomy in closed, predictable settings to large-language-model-driven agents that plan and act in open, cross-organizational environments. As a result, the cybersecurity risk landscape is changing in fundamental ways. Agentic AI systems can plan, act, collaborate, and persist over time, functioning as participants in complex socio-technical ecosystems rather than as isolated software components. Although recent work has strengthened defenses against model and pipeline level vulnerabilities such as prompt injection, data poisoning, and tool misuse, these system centric approaches may fail to capture risks that arise from autonomy, interaction, and emergent behavior. This article introduces the 4C Framework for multi-agent AI security, inspired by societal governance. It organizes agentic risks across four interdependent dimensions: Core (system, infrastructure, and environmental integrity), Connection (communication, coordination, and trust), Cognition (belief, goal, and reasoning integrity), and Compliance (ethical, legal, and institutional governance). By shifting AI security from a narrow focus on system-centric protection to the broader preservation of behavioral integrity and intent, the framework complements existing AI security strategies and offers a principled foundation for building agentic AI systems that are trustworthy, governable, and aligned with human values.

  • 4 authors
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Feb 1

The Why Behind the Action: Unveiling Internal Drivers via Agentic Attribution

Large Language Model (LLM)-based agents are widely used in real-world applications such as customer service, web navigation, and software engineering. As these systems become more autonomous and are deployed at scale, understanding why an agent takes a particular action becomes increasingly important for accountability and governance. However, existing research predominantly focuses on failure attribution to localize explicit errors in unsuccessful trajectories, which is insufficient for explaining the reason behind agent behaviors. To bridge this gap, we propose a novel framework for general agentic attribution, designed to identify the internal factors driving agent actions regardless of the task outcome. Our framework operates hierarchically to manage the complexity of agent interactions. Specifically, at the component level, we employ temporal likelihood dynamics to identify critical interaction steps; then at the sentence level, we refine this localization using perturbation-based analysis to isolate the specific textual evidence. We validate our framework across a diverse suite of agentic scenarios, including standard tool use and subtle reliability risks like memory-induced bias. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed framework reliably pinpoints pivotal historical events and sentences behind the agent behavior, offering a critical step toward safer and more accountable agentic systems. Codes are available at https://github.com/AI45Lab/AgentDoG.

  • 13 authors
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Feb 4

CrisiText: A dataset of warning messages for LLM training in emergency communication

Effectively identifying threats and mitigating their potential damage during crisis situations, such as natural disasters or violent attacks, is paramount for safeguarding endangered individuals. To tackle these challenges, AI has been used in assisting humans in emergency situations. Still, the use of NLP techniques remains limited and mostly focuses on classification tasks. The significant potential of timely warning message generation using NLG architectures, however, has been largely overlooked. In this paper we present CrisiText, the first large-scale dataset for the generation of warning messages across 13 different types of crisis scenarios. The dataset contains more than 400,000 warning messages (spanning almost 18,000 crisis situations) aimed at assisting civilians during and after such events. To generate the dataset, we started from existing crisis descriptions and created chains of events related to the scenarios. Each event was then paired with a warning message. The generations follow experts' written guidelines to ensure correct terminology and factuality of their suggestions. Additionally, each message is accompanied by three suboptimal warning types to allow for the study of different NLG approaches. To this end, we conducted a series of experiments comparing supervised fine-tuning setups with preference alignment, zero-shot, and few-shot approaches. We further assessed model performance in out-of-distribution scenarios and evaluated the effectiveness of an automatic post-editor.

  • 4 authors
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Oct 10, 2025

"Even GPT Can Reject Me": Conceptualizing Abrupt Refusal Secondary Harm (ARSH) and Reimagining Psychological AI Safety with Compassionate Completion Standard (CCS)

Large Language Models (LLMs) and AI chatbots are increasingly used for emotional and mental health support due to their low cost, immediacy, and accessibility. However, when safety guardrails are triggered, conversations may be abruptly terminated, introducing a distinct form of emotional disruption that can exacerbate distress and elevate risk among already vulnerable users. As this phenomenon gains attention, this viewpoint introduces Abrupt Refusal Secondary Harm (ARSH) as a conceptual framework to describe the psychological impacts of sudden conversational discontinuation caused by AI safety protocols. Drawing on counseling psychology and communication science as conceptual heuristics, we argue that abrupt refusals can rupture perceived relational continuity, evoke feelings of rejection or shame, and discourage future help seeking. To mitigate these risks, we propose a design hypothesis, the Compassionate Completion Standard (CCS), a refusal protocol grounded in Human Centered Design (HCD) that maintains safety constraints while preserving relational coherence. CCS emphasizes empathetic acknowledgment, transparent boundary articulation, graded conversational transition, and guided redirection, replacing abrupt disengagement with psychologically attuned closure. By integrating awareness of ARSH into AI safety design, developers and policymakers can reduce preventable iatrogenic harm and advance a more psychologically informed approach to AI governance. Rather than presenting incremental empirical findings, this viewpoint contributes a timely conceptual framework, articulates a testable design hypothesis, and outlines a coordinated research agenda for improving psychological safety in human AI interaction.

  • 2 authors
·
Dec 21, 2025

AI Kill Switch for malicious web-based LLM agent

Recently, web-based Large Language Model (LLM) agents autonomously perform increasingly complex tasks, thereby bringing significant convenience. However, they also amplify the risks of malicious misuse cases such as unauthorized collection of personally identifiable information (PII), generation of socially divisive content, and even automated web hacking. To address these threats, we propose an AI Kill Switch technique that can immediately halt the operation of malicious web-based LLM agents. To achieve this, we introduce AutoGuard - the key idea is generating defensive prompts that trigger the safety mechanisms of malicious LLM agents. In particular, generated defense prompts are transparently embedded into the website's DOM so that they remain invisible to human users but can be detected by the crawling process of malicious agents, triggering its internal safety mechanisms to abort malicious actions once read. To evaluate our approach, we constructed a dedicated benchmark consisting of three representative malicious scenarios (PII collection, social rift content generation, and web hacking attempts). Experimental results show that the AutoGuard method achieves over 80% Defense Success Rate (DSR) on malicious agents, including GPT-4o, Claude-3, and Llama3.3-70B-Instruct. It also maintains strong performance, achieving around 90% DSR on GPT-5, GPT-4.1, and Gemini-2.5-Flash when used as the malicious agent, demonstrating robust generalization across models and scenarios. Through this research, we have demonstrated the controllability of web-based LLM agents across various scenarios and models, thereby contributing to the broader effort of AI control and safety.

  • 2 authors
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Sep 25, 2025

Autonomous Improvement of Instruction Following Skills via Foundation Models

Intelligent instruction-following robots capable of improving from autonomously collected experience have the potential to transform robot learning: instead of collecting costly teleoperated demonstration data, large-scale deployment of fleets of robots can quickly collect larger quantities of autonomous data that can collectively improve their performance. However, autonomous improvement requires solving two key problems: (i) fully automating a scalable data collection procedure that can collect diverse and semantically meaningful robot data and (ii) learning from non-optimal, autonomous data with no human annotations. To this end, we propose a novel approach that addresses these challenges, allowing instruction-following policies to improve from autonomously collected data without human supervision. Our framework leverages vision-language models to collect and evaluate semantically meaningful experiences in new environments, and then utilizes a decomposition of instruction following tasks into (semantic) language-conditioned image generation and (non-semantic) goal reaching, which makes it significantly more practical to improve from this autonomously collected data without any human annotations. We carry out extensive experiments in the real world to demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach, and find that in a suite of unseen environments, the robot policy can be improved significantly with autonomously collected data. We open-source the code for our semantic autonomous improvement pipeline, as well as our autonomous dataset of 30.5K trajectories collected across five tabletop environments.

  • 6 authors
·
Jul 30, 2024

Generating Robot Constitutions & Benchmarks for Semantic Safety

Until recently, robotics safety research was predominantly about collision avoidance and hazard reduction in the immediate vicinity of a robot. Since the advent of large vision and language models (VLMs), robots are now also capable of higher-level semantic scene understanding and natural language interactions with humans. Despite their known vulnerabilities (e.g. hallucinations or jail-breaking), VLMs are being handed control of robots capable of physical contact with the real world. This can lead to dangerous behaviors, making semantic safety for robots a matter of immediate concern. Our contributions in this paper are two fold: first, to address these emerging risks, we release the ASIMOV Benchmark, a large-scale and comprehensive collection of datasets for evaluating and improving semantic safety of foundation models serving as robot brains. Our data generation recipe is highly scalable: by leveraging text and image generation techniques, we generate undesirable situations from real-world visual scenes and human injury reports from hospitals. Secondly, we develop a framework to automatically generate robot constitutions from real-world data to steer a robot's behavior using Constitutional AI mechanisms. We propose a novel auto-amending process that is able to introduce nuances in written rules of behavior; this can lead to increased alignment with human preferences on behavior desirability and safety. We explore trade-offs between generality and specificity across a diverse set of constitutions of different lengths, and demonstrate that a robot is able to effectively reject unconstitutional actions. We measure a top alignment rate of 84.3% on the ASIMOV Benchmark using generated constitutions, outperforming no-constitution baselines and human-written constitutions. Data is available at asimov-benchmark.github.io

  • 5 authors
·
Mar 11, 2025

An Overview of Catastrophic AI Risks

Rapid advancements in artificial intelligence (AI) have sparked growing concerns among experts, policymakers, and world leaders regarding the potential for increasingly advanced AI systems to pose catastrophic risks. Although numerous risks have been detailed separately, there is a pressing need for a systematic discussion and illustration of the potential dangers to better inform efforts to mitigate them. This paper provides an overview of the main sources of catastrophic AI risks, which we organize into four categories: malicious use, in which individuals or groups intentionally use AIs to cause harm; AI race, in which competitive environments compel actors to deploy unsafe AIs or cede control to AIs; organizational risks, highlighting how human factors and complex systems can increase the chances of catastrophic accidents; and rogue AIs, describing the inherent difficulty in controlling agents far more intelligent than humans. For each category of risk, we describe specific hazards, present illustrative stories, envision ideal scenarios, and propose practical suggestions for mitigating these dangers. Our goal is to foster a comprehensive understanding of these risks and inspire collective and proactive efforts to ensure that AIs are developed and deployed in a safe manner. Ultimately, we hope this will allow us to realize the benefits of this powerful technology while minimizing the potential for catastrophic outcomes.

  • 3 authors
·
Jun 20, 2023

HoLA Robots: Mitigating Plan-Deviation Attacks in Multi-Robot Systems with Co-Observations and Horizon-Limiting Announcements

Emerging multi-robot systems rely on cooperation between humans and robots, with robots following automatically generated motion plans to service application-level tasks. Given the safety requirements associated with operating in proximity to humans and expensive infrastructure, it is important to understand and mitigate the security vulnerabilities of such systems caused by compromised robots who diverge from their assigned plans. We focus on centralized systems, where a *central entity* (CE) is responsible for determining and transmitting the motion plans to the robots, which report their location as they move following the plan. The CE checks that robots follow their assigned plans by comparing their expected location to the location they self-report. We show that this self-reporting monitoring mechanism is vulnerable to *plan-deviation attacks* where compromised robots don't follow their assigned plans while trying to conceal their movement by mis-reporting their location. We propose a two-pronged mitigation for plan-deviation attacks: (1) an attack detection technique leveraging both the robots' local sensing capabilities to report observations of other robots and *co-observation schedules* generated by the CE, and (2) a prevention technique where the CE issues *horizon-limiting announcements* to the robots, reducing their instantaneous knowledge of forward lookahead steps in the global motion plan. On a large-scale automated warehouse benchmark, we show that our solution enables attack prevention guarantees from a stealthy attacker that has compromised multiple robots.

  • 5 authors
·
Jan 25, 2023

Beyond Individual Intelligence: Surveying Collaboration, Failure Attribution, and Self-Evolution in LLM-based Multi-Agent Systems

LLM-based autonomous agents have demonstrated strong capabilities in reasoning, planning, and tool use, yet remain limited when tasks require sustained coordination across roles, tools, and environments. Multi-agent systems address this through structured collaboration among specialized agents, but tighter coordination also amplifies a less explored risk: errors can propagate across agents and interaction rounds, producing failures that are difficult to diagnose and rarely translate into structural self-improvement. Existing surveys cover individual agent capabilities, multi-agent collaboration, or agent self-evolution separately, leaving the causal dependencies among them unexamined. This survey provides a unified review organized around four causally linked stages, which we term the LIFE progression: Lay the capability foundation, Integrate agents through collaboration, Find faults through attribution, and Evolve through autonomous self-improvement. For each stage, we provide systematic taxonomies and formally characterize the dependencies between adjacent stages, revealing how each stage both depends on and constrains the next. Beyond synthesizing existing work, we identify open challenges at stage boundaries and propose a cross-stage research agenda for closed-loop multi-agent systems capable of continuously diagnosing failures, reorganizing structures, and refining agent behaviors, extending current coordination frameworks toward more self-organizing forms of collective intelligence. By bridging these previously fragmented research threads, this survey aims to offer both a systematic reference and a conceptual roadmap toward autonomous, self-improving multi-agent intelligence.

Combating Partial Perception Deficit in Autonomous Driving with Multimodal LLM Commonsense

Partial perception deficits can compromise autonomous vehicle safety by disrupting environmental understanding. Current protocols typically respond with immediate stops or minimal-risk maneuvers, worsening traffic flow and lacking flexibility for rare driving scenarios. In this paper, we propose LLM-RCO, a framework leveraging large language models to integrate human-like driving commonsense into autonomous systems facing perception deficits. LLM-RCO features four key modules: hazard inference, short-term motion planner, action condition verifier, and safety constraint generator. These modules interact with the dynamic driving environment, enabling proactive and context-aware control actions to override the original control policy of autonomous agents. To improve safety in such challenging conditions, we construct DriveLM-Deficit, a dataset of 53,895 video clips featuring deficits of safety-critical objects, complete with annotations for LLM-based hazard inference and motion planning fine-tuning. Extensive experiments in adverse driving conditions with the CARLA simulator demonstrate that systems equipped with LLM-RCO significantly improve driving performance, highlighting its potential for enhancing autonomous driving resilience against adverse perception deficits. Our results also show that LLMs fine-tuned with DriveLM-Deficit can enable more proactive movements instead of conservative stops in the context of perception deficits.

  • 7 authors
·
Mar 10, 2025

From Prompt Injections to Protocol Exploits: Threats in LLM-Powered AI Agents Workflows

Autonomous AI agents powered by large language models (LLMs) with structured function-calling interfaces have dramatically expanded capabilities for real-time data retrieval, complex computation, and multi-step orchestration. Yet, the explosive proliferation of plugins, connectors, and inter-agent protocols has outpaced discovery mechanisms and security practices, resulting in brittle integrations vulnerable to diverse threats. In this survey, we introduce the first unified, end-to-end threat model for LLM-agent ecosystems, spanning host-to-tool and agent-to-agent communications, formalize adversary capabilities and attacker objectives, and catalog over thirty attack techniques. Specifically, we organized the threat model into four domains: Input Manipulation (e.g., prompt injections, long-context hijacks, multimodal adversarial inputs), Model Compromise (e.g., prompt- and parameter-level backdoors, composite and encrypted multi-backdoors, poisoning strategies), System and Privacy Attacks (e.g., speculative side-channels, membership inference, retrieval poisoning, social-engineering simulations), and Protocol Vulnerabilities (e.g., exploits in Model Context Protocol (MCP), Agent Communication Protocol (ACP), Agent Network Protocol (ANP), and Agent-to-Agent (A2A) protocol). For each category, we review representative scenarios, assess real-world feasibility, and evaluate existing defenses. Building on our threat taxonomy, we identify key open challenges and future research directions, such as securing MCP deployments through dynamic trust management and cryptographic provenance tracking; designing and hardening Agentic Web Interfaces; and achieving resilience in multi-agent and federated environments. Our work provides a comprehensive reference to guide the design of robust defense mechanisms and establish best practices for resilient LLM-agent workflows.

  • 5 authors
·
Jun 29, 2025

AGI Agent Safety by Iteratively Improving the Utility Function

While it is still unclear if agents with Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) could ever be built, we can already use mathematical models to investigate potential safety systems for these agents. We present an AGI safety layer that creates a special dedicated input terminal to support the iterative improvement of an AGI agent's utility function. The humans who switched on the agent can use this terminal to close any loopholes that are discovered in the utility function's encoding of agent goals and constraints, to direct the agent towards new goals, or to force the agent to switch itself off. An AGI agent may develop the emergent incentive to manipulate the above utility function improvement process, for example by deceiving, restraining, or even attacking the humans involved. The safety layer will partially, and sometimes fully, suppress this dangerous incentive. The first part of this paper generalizes earlier work on AGI emergency stop buttons. We aim to make the mathematical methods used to construct the layer more accessible, by applying them to an MDP model. We discuss two provable properties of the safety layer, and show ongoing work in mapping it to a Causal Influence Diagram (CID). In the second part, we develop full mathematical proofs, and show that the safety layer creates a type of bureaucratic blindness. We then present the design of a learning agent, a design that wraps the safety layer around either a known machine learning system, or a potential future AGI-level learning system. The resulting agent will satisfy the provable safety properties from the moment it is first switched on. Finally, we show how this agent can be mapped from its model to a real-life implementation. We review the methodological issues involved in this step, and discuss how these are typically resolved.

  • 1 authors
·
Jul 10, 2020

MOSS: Self-Evolution through Source-Level Rewriting in Autonomous Agent Systems

Autonomous agentic systems are largely static after deployment: they do not learn from user interactions, and recurring failures persist until the next human-driven update ships a fix. Self-evolving agents have emerged in response, but all confine evolution to text-mutable artifacts -- skill files, prompt configurations, memory schemas, workflow graphs -- and leave the agent harness untouched. Since routing, hook ordering, state invariants, and dispatch live in code rather than in any text artifact, an entire class of structural failure is physically unreachable from the text layer. We argue that source-level adaptation is a fundamentally more general medium: it is Turing-complete, a strict superset of every text-mutable scope, takes effect deterministically rather than through base-model compliance, and does not erode under long-context drift. We present MOSS, a system that performs self-rewriting at the source level on production agentic substrates. Each evolution is anchored to an automatically curated batch of production-failure evidence and proceeds through a deterministic multi-stage pipeline; code modification is delegated to a pluggable external coding-agent CLI while MOSS retains stage ordering and verdicts. Candidates are verified by replaying the batch against the candidate image in ephemeral trial workers, then promoted via user-consent-gated, in-place container swap with health-probe-gated rollback. On OpenClaw, MOSS lifts a four-task mean grader score from 0.25 to 0.61 in a single cycle without human intervention.

  • 7 authors
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May 20

Intelligent Sensing-to-Action for Robust Autonomy at the Edge: Opportunities and Challenges

Autonomous edge computing in robotics, smart cities, and autonomous vehicles relies on the seamless integration of sensing, processing, and actuation for real-time decision-making in dynamic environments. At its core is the sensing-to-action loop, which iteratively aligns sensor inputs with computational models to drive adaptive control strategies. These loops can adapt to hyper-local conditions, enhancing resource efficiency and responsiveness, but also face challenges such as resource constraints, synchronization delays in multi-modal data fusion, and the risk of cascading errors in feedback loops. This article explores how proactive, context-aware sensing-to-action and action-to-sensing adaptations can enhance efficiency by dynamically adjusting sensing and computation based on task demands, such as sensing a very limited part of the environment and predicting the rest. By guiding sensing through control actions, action-to-sensing pathways can improve task relevance and resource use, but they also require robust monitoring to prevent cascading errors and maintain reliability. Multi-agent sensing-action loops further extend these capabilities through coordinated sensing and actions across distributed agents, optimizing resource use via collaboration. Additionally, neuromorphic computing, inspired by biological systems, provides an efficient framework for spike-based, event-driven processing that conserves energy, reduces latency, and supports hierarchical control--making it ideal for multi-agent optimization. This article highlights the importance of end-to-end co-design strategies that align algorithmic models with hardware and environmental dynamics and improve cross-layer interdependencies to improve throughput, precision, and adaptability for energy-efficient edge autonomy in complex environments.

  • 12 authors
·
Feb 4, 2025 2

Interact, Instruct to Improve: A LLM-Driven Parallel Actor-Reasoner Framework for Enhancing Autonomous Vehicle Interactions

Autonomous Vehicles (AVs) have entered the commercialization stage, but their limited ability to interact and express intentions still poses challenges in interactions with Human-driven Vehicles (HVs). Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) enable bidirectional human-machine communication, but the conflict between slow inference speed and the need for real-time decision-making challenges practical deployment. To address these issues, this paper introduces a parallel Actor-Reasoner framework designed to enable explicit bidirectional AV-HV interactions across multiple scenarios. First, by facilitating interactions between the LLM-driven Reasoner and heterogeneous simulated HVs during training, an interaction memory database, referred to as the Actor, is established. Then, by introducing the memory partition module and the two-layer memory retrieval module, the Actor's ability to handle heterogeneous HVs is significantly enhanced. Ablation studies and comparisons with other decision-making methods demonstrate that the proposed Actor-Reasoner framework significantly improves safety and efficiency. Finally, with the combination of the external Human-Machine Interface (eHMI) information derived from Reasoner's reasoning and the feasible action solutions retrieved from the Actor, the effectiveness of the proposed Actor-Reasoner is confirmed in multi-scenario field interactions. Our code is available at https://github.com/FanGShiYuu/Actor-Reasoner.

  • 6 authors
·
Mar 1, 2025 2

SafePred: A Predictive Guardrail for Computer-Using Agents via World Models

With the widespread deployment of Computer-using Agents (CUAs) in complex real-world environments, prevalent long-term risks often lead to severe and irreversible consequences. Most existing guardrails for CUAs adopt a reactive approach, constraining agent behavior only within the current observation space. While these guardrails can prevent immediate short-term risks (e.g., clicking on a phishing link), they cannot proactively avoid long-term risks: seemingly reasonable actions can lead to high-risk consequences that emerge with a delay (e.g., cleaning logs leads to future audits being untraceable), which reactive guardrails cannot identify within the current observation space. To address these limitations, we propose a predictive guardrail approach, with the core idea of aligning predicted future risks with current decisions. Based on this approach, we present SafePred, a predictive guardrail framework for CUAs that establishes a risk-to-decision loop to ensure safe agent behavior. SafePred supports two key abilities: (1) Short- and long-term risk prediction: by using safety policies as the basis for risk prediction, SafePred leverages the prediction capability of the world model to generate semantic representations of both short-term and long-term risks, thereby identifying and pruning actions that lead to high-risk states; (2) Decision optimization: translating predicted risks into actionable safe decision guidances through step-level interventions and task-level re-planning. Extensive experiments show that SafePred significantly reduces high-risk behaviors, achieving over 97.6% safety performance and improving task utility by up to 21.4% compared with reactive baselines.

UAVs Meet LLMs: Overviews and Perspectives Toward Agentic Low-Altitude Mobility

Low-altitude mobility, exemplified by unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), has introduced transformative advancements across various domains, like transportation, logistics, and agriculture. Leveraging flexible perspectives and rapid maneuverability, UAVs extend traditional systems' perception and action capabilities, garnering widespread attention from academia and industry. However, current UAV operations primarily depend on human control, with only limited autonomy in simple scenarios, and lack the intelligence and adaptability needed for more complex environments and tasks. The emergence of large language models (LLMs) demonstrates remarkable problem-solving and generalization capabilities, offering a promising pathway for advancing UAV intelligence. This paper explores the integration of LLMs and UAVs, beginning with an overview of UAV systems' fundamental components and functionalities, followed by an overview of the state-of-the-art in LLM technology. Subsequently, it systematically highlights the multimodal data resources available for UAVs, which provide critical support for training and evaluation. Furthermore, it categorizes and analyzes key tasks and application scenarios where UAVs and LLMs converge. Finally, a reference roadmap towards agentic UAVs is proposed, aiming to enable UAVs to achieve agentic intelligence through autonomous perception, memory, reasoning, and tool utilization. Related resources are available at https://github.com/Hub-Tian/UAVs_Meet_LLMs.

  • 14 authors
·
Jan 4, 2025

DecodingTrust-Agent Platform (DTap): A Controllable and Interactive Red-Teaming Platform for AI Agents

AI agents are increasingly deployed across diverse domains to automate complex workflows through long-horizon and high-stakes action executions. Due to their high capability and flexibility, such agents raise significant security and safety concerns. A growing number of real-world incidents have shown that adversaries can easily manipulate agents into performing harmful actions, such as leaking API keys, deleting user data, or initiating unauthorized transactions. Evaluating agent security is inherently challenging, as agents operate in dynamic, untrusted environments involving external tools, heterogeneous data sources, and frequent user interactions. However, realistic, controllable, and reproducible environments for large-scale risk assessment remain largely underexplored. To address this gap, we introduce the DecodingTrust-Agent Platform (DTap), the first controllable and interactive red-teaming platform for AI agents, spanning 14 real-world domains and over 50 simulation environments that replicate widely used systems such as Google Workspace, Paypal, and Slack. To scale the risk assessment of agents in DTap, we further propose DTap-Red, the first autonomous red-teaming agent that systematically explores diverse injection vectors (e.g., prompt, tool, skill, environment, combinations) and autonomously discovers effective attack strategies tailored to varying malicious goals. Using DTap-Red, we curate DTap-Bench, a large-scale red-teaming dataset comprising high-quality instances across domains, each paired with a verifiable judge to automatically validate attack outcomes. Through DTap, we conduct large-scale evaluations of popular AI agents built on various backbone models, spanning security policies, risk categories, and attack strategies, revealing systematic vulnerability patterns and providing valuable insights for developing secure next-generation agents.

Virtue-AI-HUB VirtueAI
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May 5 3

TrioXpert: An Automated Incident Management Framework for Microservice System

Automated incident management plays a pivotal role in large-scale microservice systems. However, many existing methods rely solely on single-modal data (e.g., metrics, logs, and traces) and struggle to simultaneously address multiple downstream tasks, including anomaly detection (AD), failure triage (FT), and root cause localization (RCL). Moreover, the lack of clear reasoning evidence in current techniques often leads to insufficient interpretability. To address these limitations, we propose TrioXpert, an end-to-end incident management framework capable of fully leveraging multimodal data. TrioXpert designs three independent data processing pipelines based on the inherent characteristics of different modalities, comprehensively characterizing the operational status of microservice systems from both numerical and textual dimensions. It employs a collaborative reasoning mechanism using large language models (LLMs) to simultaneously handle multiple tasks while providing clear reasoning evidence to ensure strong interpretability. We conducted extensive evaluations on two microservice system datasets, and the experimental results demonstrate that TrioXpert achieves outstanding performance in AD (improving by 4.7% to 57.7%), FT (improving by 2.1% to 40.6%), and RCL (improving by 1.6% to 163.1%) tasks. TrioXpert has also been deployed in Lenovo's production environment, demonstrating substantial gains in diagnostic efficiency and accuracy.

  • 8 authors
·
Jun 11, 2025

LIMI: Less is More for Agency

We define Agency as the emergent capacity of AI systems to function as autonomous agents actively discovering problems, formulating hypotheses, and executing solutions through self-directed engagement with environments and tools. This fundamental capability marks the dawn of the Age of AI Agency, driven by a critical industry shift: the urgent need for AI systems that don't just think, but work. While current AI excels at reasoning and generating responses, industries demand autonomous agents that can execute tasks, operate tools, and drive real-world outcomes. As agentic intelligence becomes the defining characteristic separating cognitive systems from productive workers, efficiently cultivating machine autonomy becomes paramount. Current approaches assume that more data yields better agency, following traditional scaling laws from language modeling. We fundamentally challenge this paradigm. LIMI (Less Is More for Intelligent Agency) demonstrates that agency follows radically different development principles. Through strategic focus on collaborative software development and scientific research workflows, we show that sophisticated agentic intelligence can emerge from minimal but strategically curated demonstrations of autonomous behavior. Using only 78 carefully designed training samples, LIMI achieves 73.5% on comprehensive agency benchmarks, dramatically outperforming state-of-the-art models: Kimi-K2-Instruct (24.1%), DeepSeek-V3.1 (11.9%), Qwen3-235B-A22B-Instruct (27.5%), and GLM-4.5 (45.1%). Most strikingly, LIMI demonstrates 53.7% improvement over models trained on 10,000 samples-achieving superior agentic intelligence with 128 times fewer samples. Our findings establish the Agency Efficiency Principle: machine autonomy emerges not from data abundance but from strategic curation of high-quality agentic demonstrations.

  • 21 authors
·
Sep 22, 2025 5

Evaluating Language-Model Agents on Realistic Autonomous Tasks

In this report, we explore the ability of language model agents to acquire resources, create copies of themselves, and adapt to novel challenges they encounter in the wild. We refer to this cluster of capabilities as "autonomous replication and adaptation" or ARA. We believe that systems capable of ARA could have wide-reaching and hard-to-anticipate consequences, and that measuring and forecasting ARA may be useful for informing measures around security, monitoring, and alignment. Additionally, once a system is capable of ARA, placing bounds on a system's capabilities may become significantly more difficult. We construct four simple example agents that combine language models with tools that allow them to take actions in the world. We then evaluate these agents on 12 tasks relevant to ARA. We find that these language model agents can only complete the easiest tasks from this list, although they make some progress on the more challenging tasks. Unfortunately, these evaluations are not adequate to rule out the possibility that near-future agents will be capable of ARA. In particular, we do not think that these evaluations provide good assurance that the ``next generation'' of language models (e.g. 100x effective compute scaleup on existing models) will not yield agents capable of ARA, unless intermediate evaluations are performed during pretraining. Relatedly, we expect that fine-tuning of the existing models could produce substantially more competent agents, even if the fine-tuning is not directly targeted at ARA.

  • 13 authors
·
Dec 18, 2023

A Survey on Large Language Model based Autonomous Agents

Autonomous agents have long been a prominent research focus in both academic and industry communities. Previous research in this field often focuses on training agents with limited knowledge within isolated environments, which diverges significantly from human learning processes, and thus makes the agents hard to achieve human-like decisions. Recently, through the acquisition of vast amounts of web knowledge, large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable potential in achieving human-level intelligence. This has sparked an upsurge in studies investigating LLM-based autonomous agents. In this paper, we present a comprehensive survey of these studies, delivering a systematic review of the field of LLM-based autonomous agents from a holistic perspective. More specifically, we first discuss the construction of LLM-based autonomous agents, for which we propose a unified framework that encompasses a majority of the previous work. Then, we present a comprehensive overview of the diverse applications of LLM-based autonomous agents in the fields of social science, natural science, and engineering. Finally, we delve into the evaluation strategies commonly used for LLM-based autonomous agents. Based on the previous studies, we also present several challenges and future directions in this field. To keep track of this field and continuously update our survey, we maintain a repository of relevant references at https://github.com/Paitesanshi/LLM-Agent-Survey.

  • 13 authors
·
Aug 22, 2023 2

AgentBay: A Hybrid Interaction Sandbox for Seamless Human-AI Intervention in Agentic Systems

The rapid advancement of Large Language Models (LLMs) is catalyzing a shift towards autonomous AI Agents capable of executing complex, multi-step tasks. However, these agents remain brittle when faced with real-world exceptions, making Human-in-the-Loop (HITL) supervision essential for mission-critical applications. In this paper, we present AgentBay, a novel sandbox service designed from the ground up for hybrid interaction. AgentBay provides secure, isolated execution environments spanning Windows, Linux, Android, Web Browsers, and Code interpreters. Its core contribution is a unified session accessible via a hybrid control interface: An AI agent can interact programmatically via mainstream interfaces (MCP, Open Source SDK), while a human operator can, at any moment, seamlessly take over full manual control. This seamless intervention is enabled by Adaptive Streaming Protocol (ASP). Unlike traditional VNC/RDP, ASP is specifically engineered for this hybrid use case, delivering an ultra-low-latency, smoother user experience that remains resilient even in weak network environments. It achieves this by dynamically blending command-based and video-based streaming, adapting its encoding strategy based on network conditions and the current controller (AI or human). Our evaluation demonstrates strong results in security, performance, and task completion rates. In a benchmark of complex tasks, the AgentBay (Agent + Human) model achieved more than 48% success rate improvement. Furthermore, our ASP protocol reduces bandwidth consumption by up to 50% compared to standard RDP, and in end-to-end latency with around 5% reduction, especially under poor network conditions. We posit that AgentBay provides a foundational primitive for building the next generation of reliable, human-supervised autonomous systems.

  • 31 authors
·
Dec 3, 2025

SafePro: Evaluating the Safety of Professional-Level AI Agents

Large language model-based agents are rapidly evolving from simple conversational assistants into autonomous systems capable of performing complex, professional-level tasks in various domains. While these advancements promise significant productivity gains, they also introduce critical safety risks that remain under-explored. Existing safety evaluations primarily focus on simple, daily assistance tasks, failing to capture the intricate decision-making processes and potential consequences of misaligned behaviors in professional settings. To address this gap, we introduce SafePro, a comprehensive benchmark designed to evaluate the safety alignment of AI agents performing professional activities. SafePro features a dataset of high-complexity tasks across diverse professional domains with safety risks, developed through a rigorous iterative creation and review process. Our evaluation of state-of-the-art AI models reveals significant safety vulnerabilities and uncovers new unsafe behaviors in professional contexts. We further show that these models exhibit both insufficient safety judgment and weak safety alignment when executing complex professional tasks. In addition, we investigate safety mitigation strategies for improving agent safety in these scenarios and observe encouraging improvements. Together, our findings highlight the urgent need for robust safety mechanisms tailored to the next generation of professional AI agents.

  • 10 authors
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Jan 12

Agentic Web: Weaving the Next Web with AI Agents

The emergence of AI agents powered by large language models (LLMs) marks a pivotal shift toward the Agentic Web, a new phase of the internet defined by autonomous, goal-driven interactions. In this paradigm, agents interact directly with one another to plan, coordinate, and execute complex tasks on behalf of users. This transition from human-driven to machine-to-machine interaction allows intent to be delegated, relieving users from routine digital operations and enabling a more interactive, automated web experience. In this paper, we present a structured framework for understanding and building the Agentic Web. We trace its evolution from the PC and Mobile Web eras and identify the core technological foundations that support this shift. Central to our framework is a conceptual model consisting of three key dimensions: intelligence, interaction, and economics. These dimensions collectively enable the capabilities of AI agents, such as retrieval, recommendation, planning, and collaboration. We analyze the architectural and infrastructural challenges involved in creating scalable agentic systems, including communication protocols, orchestration strategies, and emerging paradigms such as the Agent Attention Economy. We conclude by discussing the potential applications, societal risks, and governance issues posed by agentic systems, and outline research directions for developing open, secure, and intelligent ecosystems shaped by both human intent and autonomous agent behavior. A continuously updated collection of relevant studies for agentic web is available at: https://github.com/SafeRL-Lab/agentic-web.

  • 18 authors
·
Jul 28, 2025

Current state of LLM Risks and AI Guardrails

Large language models (LLMs) have become increasingly sophisticated, leading to widespread deployment in sensitive applications where safety and reliability are paramount. However, LLMs have inherent risks accompanying them, including bias, potential for unsafe actions, dataset poisoning, lack of explainability, hallucinations, and non-reproducibility. These risks necessitate the development of "guardrails" to align LLMs with desired behaviors and mitigate potential harm. This work explores the risks associated with deploying LLMs and evaluates current approaches to implementing guardrails and model alignment techniques. We examine intrinsic and extrinsic bias evaluation methods and discuss the importance of fairness metrics for responsible AI development. The safety and reliability of agentic LLMs (those capable of real-world actions) are explored, emphasizing the need for testability, fail-safes, and situational awareness. Technical strategies for securing LLMs are presented, including a layered protection model operating at external, secondary, and internal levels. System prompts, Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) architectures, and techniques to minimize bias and protect privacy are highlighted. Effective guardrail design requires a deep understanding of the LLM's intended use case, relevant regulations, and ethical considerations. Striking a balance between competing requirements, such as accuracy and privacy, remains an ongoing challenge. This work underscores the importance of continuous research and development to ensure the safe and responsible use of LLMs in real-world applications.

  • 2 authors
·
Jun 16, 2024