Praxa is an evidence‑bound harness for governed AI agent execution that explicitly represents states such as proposal, authority, dispatch, verified external effect, and promotion through deterministic admission, brokered execution, external read‑back, reconciliation, and reviewed promotion. The authors report four evidence lanes: a repository‑local audit passing all unit and Workerd tests; a pilot on 12 curated tasks where both baseline and reliability‑layer arms passed 17 of 36 trials; a coordination‑proxy comparison where both baseline and a source‑authored candidate completed all 180 trials with equal accuracy but the candidate used fewer tokens and steps; and deployed source/configuration evidence showing bounded reflection, recall accounting, memory compilation, and tool‑health paths. None of the evidence demonstrates superiority in security, safety, or user benefit. whyItMatters:"Praxa provides a testable architecture that makes authority‑to‑effect transitions explicit, offering a framework for verifying AI agent behavior, though current evidence does not prove improved security or performance."
arXiv:2605. 11030v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Closed-loop tool-using agents are increasingly evaluated in executable web, code, and micro-task environments, but benchmark reports often conflate workloads, action-generating drivers, and the evidence admitted for systems-facing claims.
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.
The paper introduces Runtime Assurance Contracts (RAC) as a formal policy framework for high‑risk AI agents, addressing the "assurance‑transition gap" by binding autonomy boundaries, component eligibility, evidence state, transition policy, human‑review capacity, and non‑compensatory gates. RAC allows soft metrics to influence routing while mandating retries, switches, escalations, deferrals, or stops when mandatory gates fail or are unknown, ensuring aggregate performance cannot alone authorize action. The authors define the contract, evidence record, permission rule, and five invariants, and evaluate RAC through deterministic failure‑injection studies, hand‑authored traces, and a prospective synthetic holdout, comparing it to score‑only and restricted protocol baselines.
AgentAudit is an open, extensible framework that evaluates the full lifecycle of AI agents, assessing planning, tool selection, execution, memory, and reasoning across ten dimensions such as instruction integrity, security, and alignment. Unlike existing benchmarks that focus on single aspects, AgentAudit analyzes the entire execution trace to attribute failures to specific stages. The framework was tested on five large language models, revealing significant differences in trustworthiness even among models with similar task‑completion performance.
UniACE is a unified framework that standardizes the evaluation of large language model (LLM) agents by representing each benchmark as an instruction–tool–environment triplet and running models through a shared, task‑agnostic harness in isolated runtimes. It preserves native success criteria, offers an offline mode for dynamic‑resource tasks, and standardizes efficiency metrics, execution records, and failure attribution. Applying UniACE to 7 benchmarks across 24 domains and 15 models revealed significant score shifts, ranking reversals, and sensitivity to evidence representation, highlighting the impact of evaluation configuration on reported agent performance.
arXiv:2609.37501v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We propose RegLLM, a diagnostic harness for bounded autonomy in regulated agentic workflows. It instruments six trustworthiness signals: citation val...
arXiv:2608. 13867v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: AI coding agents are commonly evaluated as models but deployed as systems.
arXiv:2608.22510v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Agent benchmarks often evaluate only final answers even when agents run on stateful runtimes. We argue this under-specifies what is being evaluated: th...
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.
The paper introduces NAQD‑Env, a synthetic benchmark designed to test language agents’ ability to selectively withdraw and resume actions when new evidence, permissions, or stop instructions arise. It evaluates models against a deterministic reference policy across eleven dependency families, measuring policy agreement, task value, withdrawal, resumption, and event reporting. Experiments on 350 scenarios show low withdrawal recall, no valid resumption, and limited policy alignment, highlighting the need to treat selective withdrawal as a distinct reliability component.
arXiv:2609.35889v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Tool-using language-model agents select and execute third-party artifacts. Different implementations can return the requested output while producing...
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.