arXiv AI

When Should Agent Trust Be Conditional? Characterizing and Attacking Skill-Conditional Reputation in Agent Swarms

arXiv:2606. 14200v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Open platforms increasingly route tasks among heterogeneous LLM agents--differing in base model, scaffold, and tool stack--whose competence varies sharply by skill: an agent excellent at one skill may be useless at another.

arXiv AI
Aug 7

When Self-Evolution Backfires: Pre-Commit Gating against Skill Contamination in LLM Agents

arXiv:2608. 05810v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Self-evolving agents accumulate capability by distilling reusable skills from their execution trajectories, but we find this process is not monotonic: past a critical pool size, newly added skills degrade performance instead of improving it.

By Linfang Shang, Ming Xu, Yiding Sun, Tianle Xia, Lingxiang Hu, Lan Xu, Ning Zheng
arXiv AI
Aug 20

SkillGate: Training In-Policy Skill Selection in Long-Horizon Agents

SkillGate is a method that trains agents to select the correct skill from a large slate during an episode by separating credit signals for skill selection and execution. It addresses the problem of selector credit starvation, where traditional outcome-rewarded RL fails to give sufficient credit to the skill-naming tokens, especially in long-horizon tasks. Experiments on five benchmarks show that SkillGate improves a 9B policy’s success rate from 40.8% to 53.2%, reduces exposure to misleading candidates, and requires fewer skill reads.

By Qingyao Li, Wenxiang Jiao, Shuai Shao, Kangning Zhang, Yuan Lu, Yi Guo, Weiwen Liu, Weinan Zhang, Yong Yu
arXiv AI
Jun 30

Pessimism's Paradox: Conservative Offline Training Amplifies Reward Hacking During Online Adaptation in Reasoning Models

arXiv:2606. 30627v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Conservative offline training is widely advocated as a safe foundation for subsequent online adaptation: if a policy stays close to well-supported behaviour, the argument goes, it is less likely to exploit imperfections in a learned reward model.

By Subramanyam Sahoo, Aman Chadha, Vinija Jain, Divya Chaudhary
arXiv AI
2d ago

Chaining Skills to Hijack LLM Agents

arXiv:2610.01564v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: LLM agents use skills to improve performance on specialized tasks. To complete a user request, an agent may invoke several skills in sequence, allowi...

By Tian Dong, Zixuan Ma, Haodong Zhao, Huaien Zhang, Shaofeng Li, Hao Chen
arXiv AI
2d ago

The Delegation Danger Band: Why Mid-Capability Sub-Agents Over-Trust Inherited Stale State

The paper investigates how inherited state affects sub-agent performance in multi-agent frameworks, comparing three inheritance policies—Reset, Selective, and Full—across a ladder of Qwen3 models. It finds that reliance on stale state decreases with model capability, but a mid-capability model (Qwen3‑1.7B) exhibits a statistically significant local minimum of net harm, defining a "danger band." Selective handoff consistently improves accuracy over Full, especially within the danger band, while a fixed-threshold router fails on other datasets.

By Jundong Hu, Shekar Ramachandran
arXiv AI
Aug 18

CompoSkill: Compositional Skill Chain Attacks from Individually Scanner-Passing LLM Agent Skills

arXiv:2608. 16246v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Autonomous AI agents tackling Long Horizon Tasks depend on marketplace skills that are certified one at a time: a scanner returns a safety verdict for each skill and declares the ecosystem safe if every package passes.

By Mingxiao Liu, Zhoumian Jiang, Jianan Ma, Jian Zhang, Jialuo Chen, Xinhao Deng, Zhen Wang
arXiv AI
2d ago

Verify Claims, Not Scores: Evidence-Based Verification of Modular Agents

The paper proposes a claim‑specific verification audit for modular agents that replaces aggregate task scores with evidence‑based evaluations. Each agent conclusion is recorded with supporting evidence and classified as supported, unsupported, unresolved, or not evaluated, along with the boundary of validity. The audit employs three tools—oracle policies, perfect component replacements, and verifier‑score tests—to trace value changes, locate lost value, and assess verifier effectiveness, demonstrated on a portfolio‑allocation agent in a synthetic market.

By Ali Atiah Alzahrani