Practice Makes Unsafe: Skill Misevolution in Self-Improving LLM Agents
arXiv:2608. 12851v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Self-improving LLM agents convert successful trajectories into persistent cross-task state.
arXiv:2608. 08264v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large language model agents are becoming operational interfaces to files, memories, registries, and external tools.
arXiv:2608. 12851v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Self-improving LLM agents convert successful trajectories into persistent cross-task state.
arXiv:2602. 14211v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Agent skills extend LLM agents with task-specific instructions, executable scripts, and auxiliary resources, improving reusability but creating a new supply-chain attack surface.
The paper introduces AgentLeak, a black‑box attack that clones the task‑solving capabilities of a strong LLM agent onto a weaker one by exploiting differences between successful and failed executions. Unlike prior skill‑stealing methods that only recover explicit skill artifacts, AgentLeak identifies and incorporates missing procedural behaviors, boosting task pass rates by over 40% and closing more than 80% of the capability gap across 20 scenarios. The study demonstrates that observable execution behavior can leak proprietary procedural knowledge, posing a confidentiality risk for LLM agents.
TRUSS is a framework that generates and verifies automated agent skills, ensuring they are both functionally effective and safe. It evaluates candidate skills against source evidence and nine safety properties, then tests them in a controlled environment to capture execution traces and identify failures. The system iteratively refines skills based on these results, achieving high precision in vulnerability detection and significantly improving task performance and security rates.
arXiv:2609. 04875v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Long-running LLM agents are stateful: beyond the transcript they accrete compressed summaries, plaintext memory, pending tool plans, and, under every serving API, a KV cache.
arXiv:2608.21964v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large language model (LLM) agents increasingly operate over evolving software repositories, where success depends on repository-specific procedural kno...
The paper introduces EvoSkill-GUI, a training‑free framework that enables GUI agents to evolve their skills during deployment. Each skill is packaged with metadata, executable plans, and recovery rules, and the system follows a reflect‑revise‑reuse loop where the agent instantly revises skills based on execution feedback. Experiments on MobileWorld, AndroidWorld, and OSWorld show consistent performance gains up to +16.2% without any additional training.
TRUSS is a framework that generates and verifies automated agent skills, ensuring they are both functionally effective and safe. It first checks functional claims against evidence and evaluates artifacts against nine safety properties, then tests admitted skills in a controlled environment to capture execution traces and identify failures. The approach achieves perfect precision and recall in vulnerability detection, significantly reduces attack success rates, and boosts task effectiveness and security rates in skill generation benchmarks.
arXiv:2608.30041v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large language model agents place outputs from external skills into their execution context, allowing attacker-controlled data to influence later pri...
ClawSentry is an open‑source, framework‑agnostic security supervision gateway designed to protect autonomous large language model (LLM) agents from progressive risks that can arise at four points in the agent control loop: skill admission, invocation‑time intent, execution‑time effect, and post‑action consequence. It introduces a multi‑tier decision engine—deterministic L1, rule‑anchored L2, and read‑only L3—alongside a First‑Use Skill Package Review (FSPR) and an Agent Harness Protocol (AHP) that applies a single policy across multiple agent runtimes without modifying their internals. Evaluation on SkillInject and the SkillsSafety benchmark shows that ClawSentry significantly reduces contextual adversarial skill risk (ASR) while maintaining high task success rates (TSR).
arXiv:2607. 16345v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Modern agentic systems increasingly rely on skills: installable packages of natural language and code that teach an LLM agent to perform a domain task.
arXiv:2608. 10502v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Persistent memory lets language-model agents reuse information across sessions, but it also makes errors durable: a poisoned, stale, or misattributed record can alter reasoning, tool use, answers, and subsequent memory writes.