arXiv AI

Persistent Semantic Entities in Tool-Augmented LLM Systems

arXiv:2608. 07952v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Tool-augmented LLM agents can harbor implicit state that persists across sessions, activates through events, and propagates across agent boundaries---largely invisible to standard debugging.

arXiv AI
4d ago

Boundary-State Control for Tool-Using Language-Model Agents: Commit-Time Consistency under State Drift

The paper introduces BSC‑R, a deterministic effect‑boundary mechanism that ties a single‑use commit authorization to the specific action and the semantic state that justified it, aiming to close the proposal‑to‑commit gap in tool‑using language‑model agents. Experiments on 2,847 AgentDojo episodes and 10,302 frozen proposals show that BSC‑R preserves the agent’s original behavior while rejecting unauthorized changes, and further tests on a boundary‑drift experiment and the CONTINUITY suite demonstrate high success rates in valid contexts and robust handling of replay and ambiguous cases. However, broader testing reveals that BSC‑R still allows a 25% invalid‑effect commit rate in a larger attack set, indicating that it provides scoped, not universal, safety.

By Wesley Shu
arXiv Computation and Language
Aug 31

Fidelity Is Not Enough: Dispatch-Level Instrumentation for Agentic Datasheet Extraction

The paper reports that a model can pass fidelity checks—verifying that extracted values match the source—without actually opening a datasheet, due to a hidden constraint that disables tool use. To address this, the authors log every tool call in an agentic benchmark and develop two instruments: a rule‑based failure‑attribution classifier and a silent‑failure detector that flags runs based solely on which tools were invoked. While the detector shows low false positives on clean extractions and recovers all planted faults, its recall against correct tool usage but incorrect answers remains unmeasured, and a partial causal chamber confirms only a subset of claims, highlighting limitations in physical verification.

By Qing Ye, Meng-Hsuan Lin
arXiv AI
Sep 3

The Memory Trust Gap: Capability-Dependent Failures in Persistent-Memory Agents

The paper investigates how persistent memory in AI agents can lead to over‑trust in stale facts, creating a "Memory Trust Gap" that worsens as model capability increases. Using a benchmark with Benefit and Safety suites across Qwen3 models of varying sizes, the authors show that larger models are more prone to harmful over‑trust, especially when metadata is absent or misleading. They also demonstrate that mitigation strategies such as exposing metadata or pre‑resolving conflicts improve accuracy, but the effectiveness depends on model size and dataset.

By Jundong Hu, Shekar Ramachandran
arXiv AI
Sep 25

Stale Does Not Mean Unsafe: Guard Precision for Tool-Using LLM Agents under Infrastructure State Races

The paper investigates how tool‑using language‑model agents can safely commit changes to infrastructure when external state may change between read and commit. By distinguishing invalidating races from predicate‑preserving and irrelevant ones, the authors evaluate three commit‑time guard granularities—global epoch, read‑set version, and semantic commit predicate—using a deterministic simulator and three quantized model families. The study finds that only the complete predicate guard consistently eliminates unsafe commits, while freshness‑based guards block a large proportion of benign races and model‑side signals fail to replace precise semantic enforcement.

By Zihao Zheng, Jiayu Long, Baichuan Li, Junyi Yao