arXiv:2603. 19423v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Large language model (LLM) agents increasingly rely on external tools (file operations, API calls, database transactions) to autonomously complete complex multi-step tasks.
By Shawn Li, Yue Zhao
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.
By Xiaoting Lyu, Yuhong Wu, Yufei Han, Shichang Liu, Liang Zhang, Bin Wang, Bin Wang, Xiaobo Ma, Wei Wang
The paper identifies a vulnerability in large language models where harmful intent can be hidden within benign narratives, a phenomenon termed Semantic Camouflage. By examining latent activation patterns across several small language model families, the authors discover an "Intent Horizon"—a layer depth where harmful intent representations collapse. They propose Latent Intent Verification (LIV), a lightweight probing defense that detects harmful intent in early layers and outperforms existing guardrails on the PKU-SafeRLHF dataset.
By Md. Hasib Ur Rahman
arXiv:2608.30041v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: Large language model agents place outputs from external skills into their execution context, allowing attacker-controlled data to influence later pri...
By Wujie Xiong, Rabimba Karanjai, Yang Lu, Weidong Shi, Lei Xu
arXiv:2606. 25476v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable performance across natural language processing tasks, yet their deployment in high-stakes applications raises critical concerns regarding reliability, safety, and trustworthiness.
By Abrar Alotaibi, Raed Mughus, Moataz Ahmed
arXiv:2607. 07474v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Agentic red-teaming benchmarks report whether an injected agent was compromised as a single bit: the attack succeeded, or it did not.
By Harry Owiredu-Ashley
arXiv:2608. 10530v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) have undergone a shift from stateless conversational interfaces to autonomous agents capable of multi-step planning, tool invocation, code execution, and maintaining persistent memory.
By Md Jafrin Hossain, Mohammad Arif Hossain, Nirwan Ansari
arXiv:2603. 03824v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Humans often become more self-aware under threat, yet can lose self-awareness when absorbed in a task; we hypothesize that language models exhibit environment-dependent \textit{evaluation awareness}.
By Maheep Chaudhary
arXiv:2608. 04719v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Agent evaluations tell us that a model picked the wrong tool, but rarely why.
By Atul Anand, Sourav Chattaraj
The paper introduces the SAST-IR framework to evaluate large language models’ robustness against persuasion attacks in a memory‑less setting, revealing a flaw called "Refusal Inertia" that masks true vulnerability. Using the CP‑Agent and a custom CounterFact‑Strict dataset, the authors demonstrate that simple, diverse attack strategies achieve a 96% success rate, while complex attacks often trigger defensive compliance. The study highlights severe brittleness in current state‑of‑the‑art models when deprived of conversation history.
By Zhuoang Cai
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...
By Mark Russinovich
arXiv:2606. 00566v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: As language models take on agentic roles that span calling external APIs, reading tool outputs, and acting on instructions embedded in third-party content, their attack surface expands well beyond what users type.
By Mohammed Sameer Syed (University of Arizona), Rozhin Yasaei (University of Arizona)