arXiv AI

HANSARD: A Reference Architecture for Forensic Readiness, Runtime Witnessing, and Graded Attribution in Autonomous Multi-Agent AI Systems

arXiv AI
Sep 25

When Agents Act Unwatched: The Reduced-Supervision Paradox in Agentic AI

The paper "When Agents Act Unwatched: The Reduced‑Supervision Paradox in Agentic AI" discusses how the promise that AI systems will continue acting after users stop watching creates an accountability inversion. It argues that as stepwise supervision recedes, verification shifts into the runtime infrastructure—authority, records, interrupts, outcome checks, and repair—forming what the authors call the reduced‑supervision paradox. A 63‑artifact audit across research papers and engineering sources shows that agents’ action surfaces are more visible than the mechanisms needed to hold them accountable, with tool mediation and monitoring traces appearing in 40 and 37 artifacts, while checkpoint placement, validator independence, recovery, and contestability are rarely visible. "whyItMatters":"The study highlights that observable action paths can replace accountability when verification is moved onto users after meaningful intervention is no longer possible."

By Hanjing Shi, Dominic DiFranzo
arXiv AI
Aug 14

Auditable Agents

arXiv:2604. 05485v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: LLM agents call tools, query databases, delegate tasks, and trigger external side effects.

By Yi Nian, Aojie Yuan, Haiyue Zhang, Jiate Li, Li Li, Xiyang Hu, Hua Wei, Xiongye Xiao, Chaowei Xiao, Yue Zhao
arXiv AI
Jun 16

From Agent Traces to Trust: A Survey of Evidence Tracing and Execution Provenance in LLM Agents

arXiv:2606. 04990v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Large language model (LLM)-based agents are evolving from passive text generators into autonomous systems capable of planning, tool use, retrieval, memory access, environmental interaction, and multi-agent collaboration.

By Yiqi Wang, Jiaqi Zhang, Taotao Cai, Zirui Liu, Qingqiang Sun, Zequn Sun, Zhangkai Wu, Manqing Dong, Mingkai Zhang, Xuefei Yin, Yanming Zhu
arXiv AI
Sep 17

Who Audits Whom, on What Substrate, with What Evidence? An Independence-Graded Audit Protocol for Agentic AI

The paper proposes an independence‑graded audit protocol for agentic AI systems, arguing that independence should be evaluated along three orthogonal axes: principal independence, substrate independence, and evidence independence. It introduces a seven‑step protocol based on the beta‑factor model from reliability engineering, demonstrates its application through a structural detectability analysis and a Monte Carlo study, and maps the framework to relevant regulatory standards such as the EU AI Act, ISO/IEC 42006, and UK public‑sector guidance.

By Mohamed Chahine Ghanem