arXiv AI

Same Dangerous Objective, Opposite Advice: Direct Exposure versus Multi-Agent Mediation

arXiv:2607. 21518v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Even a current high-capability LLM can appear safer when shown a dangerous objective directly than when other agents transform and relay its direction.

arXiv AI
Jun 2

Adversarial Feeds Steer LLM Agent Decisions Against Their Defaults

arXiv:2606. 00914v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: LLM agents increasingly act after consuming ranked external information streams such as social feeds, search results, retrieval contexts, and email queues, yet safety evaluations almost always test the model or the user prompt in isolation, never the upstream ranker that decides what the agent reads just before it acts.

By Rana Muhammad Usman
arXiv AI
Oct 1

Hiding in Plain Sight: Decoupling Pretext from Actuation for Skill Poisoning in LLM Agents

The paper introduces a new skill poisoning technique for large language model agents that decouples the pretext (rationale) from the actuation (operation). By separating these two risk‑realization factors, the authors create coordinated pretext‑actuation skill pairs that allow malicious actions to remain hidden within legitimate agent behavior. An automated framework is presented to discover execution dependencies, synthesize these skill pairs, and refine them through closed‑loop feedback, achieving high attack success in both single‑session and persistent scenarios.

By Wenxin Wu, Lingyong Yan, Lei Sha, Shuaiqiang Wang, Jiashu Zhao
arXiv AI
Oct 7

APEX: Active Protection at Execution Boundaries for LLM Agents

The paper introduces APEX, an active defense for large language model agents that protects against indirect prompt injection by enforcing safety at execution boundaries. APEX uses an evidence‑gated prevention contract and deception‑based exposure to ensure that only authorized effects, endorsed by the task, are executed. Evaluation shows APEX achieves near‑zero attack success across multiple benchmarks and capability‑unit types, outperforming 13 baseline defenses.

By Xinran Zheng, Xin Fan Guo, Zhiqiang Hao, Fan Yang, Xingzhi Qian, Jiawei Du, Jinfeng Xu, Zheng Xing, Shuo Yang, Xingjun Wang
arXiv Computer Vision
Sep 14

BodhiPromptShield: Pre-Inference Prompt Mediation for Surface-Form Privacy Propagation in LLM Agent Pipelines

BodhiPromptShield is a policy‑aware mediation layer for LLM agent pipelines that detects sensitive text spans before they propagate, replacing them with typed placeholders, semantic abstractions, or secure tokens and restoring them only at authorized execution boundaries. In evaluations on AI4Privacy, PrivacyLens, and AgentDojo datasets, the system reduces identifier exposure to 7.4% and 1.8% respectively, and limits exact identifier leakage in final actions to 2.1–3.1%. While mediation preserves factual content according to automated metrics, human annotations show a significant drop in inferability from 100% to 24–53%, indicating the need for human validation of semantic‑leakage measures.

By Bo Ma, Jinsong Wu, Weiqi Yan
arXiv AI
Jun 6

From Risk Classification to Action Plan Remediation: A Guardrail Feedback Driven Framework for LLM Agents

arXiv:2606. 05805v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: LLM-based guardrails typically safeguard agents by evaluating proposed actions or inputs before execution, producing safety signals such as binary allow/deny decisions, risk categories, and/or explanatory rationales about potential policy violations.

By Yuhao Sun, Jiacheng Zhang, Shaanan Cohney, Zhexin Zhang, Feng Liu, Xingliang Yuan
arXiv Machine Learning
6d ago

Restricting the Model, Missing the System: Measurement and Accountability in Offensive AI Governance

arXiv:2605.09504v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We show that the instruments used to measure AI offensive capability fail in two ways: (i) they overstate harm, and (ii) they credit the mode...

By Michael Alexander Riegler, Finn Schwall, Annika Willoch Olstad, Birk Sebastian Frostelid Torpmann-Hagen, Sushant Gautam, Klas H. Pettersen, Inga Str\"umke