arXiv AI

Position, Role or Label? A Controlled Study of Instruction Conflicts in LLM Agents

arXiv AI
Oct 9

One Skill Too Many: How Co-Installed Skills Conflict in Coding Agents

The paper investigates how co-installed coding‑agent skills can conflict, causing the model to choose a similar skill over the intended one based solely on name and description. An empirical study of 20,947 repositories uncovered 822,109 candidate skill pairs, with 312 confirmed conflicts tested across three models, revealing that nearly one in four installed skills is overridden by a similar skill. Key findings include that conflicts often involve normative skills, that the installed skill loses core functions in about one‑fifth of runs, and that the first skill read determines the outcome, suggesting benchmarks should evaluate exclusive core functions and platforms should guard the initial read.

By Chaoliang Yan, Zihao Xu, Yuekang Li, Shangzhi Xu, Yi Liu, Gelei Deng, Siqi Ma
arXiv AI
Sep 10

Many-Tier Instruction Hierarchy in LLM Agents

The paper introduces Many-Tier Instruction Hierarchy (ManyIH), a new framework for resolving conflicts among instructions with arbitrarily many privilege levels in large language model agents. It presents ManyIH-Bench, a benchmark featuring 853 agentic tasks that require navigating up to 12 levels of conflicting instructions across 46 real-world agents. Experiments show current models achieve only about 40% accuracy when instruction conflict scales, highlighting a gap in fine-grained, scalable conflict resolution.

By Jingyu Zhang, Tianjian Li, William Jurayj, Hongyuan Zhan, Benjamin Van Durme, Daniel Khashabi
arXiv AI
3d ago

AOS-Bench: Can LLM Agents Manage Dynamic Workloads?

AOS-Bench evaluates large language model agents as dynamic workload managers, testing their ability to handle multiple concurrent tasks under shared CPU and memory limits. The benchmark shows that isolated task success does not predict performance in a streaming workload, with significant drops in heavy and medium scenarios. Execution‑policy experiments reveal that simple concurrency controls can rival more complex management strategies, highlighting the importance of workload management as a distinct agent capability.

By Erle Zhu, Genrui Zhang, Keyang Hu, Mingyu Su, Hongning Wang
arXiv Computation and Language
Oct 12

SWE-Duel: Towards a Self-Scaling Arena for Coding Agents

SWE‑Duel proposes a self‑scaling benchmark for coding agents, where tasks and oracles are generated at evaluation time to prevent data leakage and adapt difficulty to participant performance. In the arena, two agents take turns as Red and Blue: Red proposes a feature, injects a subtle bug, and must repair it blind, while Blue reviews the pull request without knowing the bug and must pass all tests. A tournament of 11 model‑harness participants on 15 repositories across five languages showed GPT‑5.5/​Codex CLI as the top solver and Claude Opus 4.8/​mini‑swe‑agent as the top task author, with newer model versions producing harder tasks for older ones.

By Wei Minn, Zhensu Sun, Lwin Khin Shar, David Lo
arXiv AI
3d ago

CTXAgent - Self-Controlled Context Management of LLM Agents

The paper introduces CTXAgent, a self‑controlled context management system for large language model agents that compacts conversation history when a token threshold is reached. It evaluates seven frontier models, comparing their ability to manage context with and without dedicated tools, and benchmarks performance across coding, scientific, and software engineering tasks. Results show that well‑managed models keep live context below 100k tokens, maintain high benchmark scores, and achieve significant cost reductions, with Claude Opus 5.5 outperforming its explicit configuration by 34% lower cost.

By Matthias Busch, Marius Tacke, Roland C. Aydin, Christian Feiler, Christian J. Cyron