arXiv AI

Context Assembly as the Controlled Variable: A Control-Theoretic View of Harness Policies for Frozen LLM Agents

arXiv:2607. 25408v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: A growing body of 2026 work applies control theory to LLM agents: Lyapunov-certified stability for tool-mediated controllers (Prinos et al.

arXiv AI
Aug 26

Knowing When to Ask for Help: Bayesian Self-Escalation in Hierarchical LLM Agents

The paper introduces a Bayesian self‑escalation strategy for hierarchical large‑language‑model agents, allowing an agent to detect during its own reasoning that it is unlikely to succeed and hand control over to a stronger model. The authors formalise this as an optimal‑stopping problem over a learned competence posterior, derive a myopic escalation threshold, and prove that the optimal policy is a time‑varying threshold without assumptions on the raw signal. They provide theoretical guarantees—including a 1/√n regret decay with n calibration trajectories—and validate the approach in simulations and a real‑model code‑generation cascade, showing that the escalation frontier outperforms post‑hoc routing at equal cost. whyItMatters":"The study offers a principled, theoretically grounded method for agents to dynamically decide when to seek stronger models, potentially improving efficiency and reliability in hierarchical LLM systems."

By Nadeem Shaikh
arXiv Machine Learning
Jul 14

A Control Theory of Predictability in Latent World Models

arXiv:2607. 10362v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Latent world models are trained to predict future states in a learned representation and are then deployed inside a planner that selects actions by simulating them forward.

By Hanzhe You, Yonggang Zhang, Maohao Ran, Zhiqin Yang, Zhenyuan Zhang, Wei Xue, Jun Song, Xinmei Tian, Yike Guo
arXiv AI
Aug 28

Safety Does Not Compose: Non-Decaying Loop State for Autonomous LLM Agents

The paper demonstrates that safety mechanisms for autonomous large language model agents fail to compose across iterative loops, as trajectory‑scoped monitors cannot detect attacks whose evidence is spread over multiple iterations. It introduces LoopHarness, a system that maintains a persistent, non‑decaying safety state across loops, bounding unauthorized actions with a constant that does not grow with the number of iterations. The authors provide a comprehensive evaluation protocol, including attacks that require cross‑iteration evidence, module ablations, and adaptive white‑box red‑team testing.

By Chenhao Wu, Haoxuan Jia, Yang Liu, Yingguang Yang, Yuhan Lin, Chongyang Zhang, Hao Zheng, Yulin Huang, Jianshen Zhang, Yongzhi Qi, Shang Luo, Kefu Xu, Jifeng Zhu, Bin Chong
arXiv Machine Learning
Aug 17

Consistent Model Chasing Is Minimax Optimal: The Exact Value of Scalar Adversarial Adaptive Control under Large Parametric Uncertainty

arXiv:2608. 13651v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We solve exactly a fundamental problem of adaptive control against adversarial disturbances: regulate the scalar system $x_{t+1} = ax_t + u_t + w_t$, $x_0=0$, $\|w\|_\infty \le 1$, where the constant pole $a \in [-\Delta, \Delta]$ is unknown in sign and magnitude and $\Delta$ is arbitrarily large.

By Dimitar Ho
arXiv AI
Jul 2

Managed Autonomy at Runtime: Gear-Based Safety and Governance for Single- and Multi-Agent Cyber-Physical Systems

arXiv:2607. 00334v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Autonomous agents, whether LLM-driven software agents or robotic physical agents, face a common class of failure modes when operating without continuous human oversight: safety violations from unverified actions, behavioral instability from unconstrained loops, and continuity loss from unhandled error states.

By Srini Ramaswamy, Wang Miaosheng
arXiv Machine Learning
Jul 21

The Behavioral Credibility Trilemma: When Calibrated Autonomy Becomes Impossible

arXiv:2605. 25739v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We prove that no reinforcement learning policy with confidence-gated autonomy can simultaneously achieve maximum helpfulness, optimal calibration, and full autonomy under rational oversight, whenever some tasks exceed the agent's reliable competence: the Behavioral Credibility Trilemma.

By Lauri Lov\'en, Nam Do, Hassan Mehmood, Dinesh Kumar Sah, Sasu Tarkoma