The paper introduces the Environment State-Text Injection (ESTI) attack, a novel method that manipulates the textual representation of environment states in large language model‑driven embodied agents without altering user instructions, model parameters, or executors. ESTI re‑frames adversarial goals as false state evidence that aligns with the current environment, thereby influencing both planning and execution through object properties, spatial relations, affordances, task‑stage rules, and execution feedback. The authors also present ESTI‑Bench, a benchmark that evaluates attack propagation across the planning‑to‑execution closed loop, and demonstrate that ESTI outperforms existing baselines on multiple embodied task datasets, achieving up to 89.32% higher planning‑level and 43.69% higher execution‑level attack success rates.
arXiv:2608. 16806v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated capabilities in in-context learning, task decomposition, step-by-step reasoning, and code generation, driving their gradual evolution from text generation models into the core of agents capable of perceiving environments, invoking tools, and executing tasks.
arXiv:2608. 05715v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Vision-Language Models (VLMs) are increasingly deployed as planners in robotic systems, where they translate natural-language commands into executable actions grounded in visual scene understanding.
arXiv:2609.36570v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Indirect prompt injection makes an LLM agent treat untrusted retrieved text as instructions. We present CounterSteer, an inference-time defense that...
INFUSE is a new benchmark that tests indirect prompt injection (IPI) in large‑language‑model agents performing long‑horizon workflows. It contains 40 realistic tasks and 56 attack scenarios across five threat categories, with attacks injected through realistic interaction surfaces rather than just initial prompts. The study evaluated 19 LLMs, generating over 41,000 adversarial trajectories and found mean attack success rates of 19.6% (LLM evaluation) and 15.4% (heuristic verification), while prompt‑level hardening reduced success from 58.2% to 14.3%.
arXiv:2407. 20242v5 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Embodied AI represents systems where AI is integrated into physical entities.
AgentSentry is an inference‑time defense for tool‑augmented large language model agents that mitigates indirect prompt injection (IPI) attacks. It uses temporal causal diagnostics by performing counterfactual re‑executions at tool‑return boundaries to detect mediator‑sensitive proposals, purifies implicated content, and resumes execution from a sanitized state. Evaluations on AgentDojo show zero successful attacks (ASR = 0%) and an average Utility Under Attack of 76.10%, outperforming baselines while maintaining low false‑positive rates.
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.
World models give embodied AI a predictive core: they compress observations into states, simulate action-conditioned futures, and enable planning beyond reactive control. This predictive layer, however, opens a new security boundary-compromise can propagate from data, sensors, prompts, or feedback into physical action.
arXiv:2607. 16199v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Multi-agent LLM systems increasingly rely on a Planner to decompose goals into sub-task sequences that downstream Executor and Critic agents execute and audit.
The paper investigates a vulnerability in feedback‑based agent planning, showing that the first round of feedback corrects a large portion of adversarial directions (46%) while subsequent rounds see a sharp decline (13% and 7%). The authors attribute this to an initialization anchoring weakness driven by plausible plan shifts, lack of counterevidence, and persistence of accepted directions. They introduce “InitAnchor”, a black‑box attack framework that exploits these factors, achieving high attack success rates across diverse tasks, architectures, and LLMs, and remaining effective against multiple defenses and real‑world agents.
arXiv:2606. 15057v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Indirect prompt injection (IPI) is a major security threat to LLM-powered agents.
The paper introduces Attnlocate, a runtime framework that localizes behavior‑guiding instructions within the attention matrix of large language model agents. By treating this localization as an object detection task, Attnlocate uses a multi‑head, multi‑layer attention aggregation scheme and a 1‑D U‑Net to identify spans that influence tool‑calling decisions. The system then adjudicates potential malicious invocations based on the authority of the source, achieving high detection metrics across diverse LLM families and demonstrating transferability to unseen models.