The paper introduces Runtime Assurance Contracts (RAC) as a formal policy framework for high‑risk AI agents, addressing the "assurance‑transition gap" by binding autonomy boundaries, component eligibility, evidence state, transition policy, human‑review capacity, and non‑compensatory gates. RAC allows soft metrics to influence routing while mandating retries, switches, escalations, deferrals, or stops when mandatory gates fail or are unknown, ensuring aggregate performance cannot alone authorize action. The authors define the contract, evidence record, permission rule, and five invariants, and evaluate RAC through deterministic failure‑injection studies, hand‑authored traces, and a prospective synthetic holdout, comparing it to score‑only and restricted protocol baselines.
By Serhii Zabolotnii
The paper introduces a self‑healing harness that enforces admission control over language‑model agents’ self‑modifications. The harness runs a Detect‑Notice‑Heal‑Validate loop, allowing agents to propose rule changes that are only granted persistent authority after demonstrating improvement on a failure case without regressing on protected cases. Across 16 benchmark runs, the harness rejected many locally beneficial proposals that caused collateral regressions, while improving task‑completion scores and reliability.
By Sina Tayebati, Divake Kumar, Nastaran Darabi, Ranganath Krishnan, Amit Ranjan Trivedi
arXiv:2606. 04990v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large language model (LLM)-based agents increasingly solve complex tasks by interacting with external tools, retrieval systems, memory modules, environments, and other agents.
By Yiqi Wang, Jiaqi Zhang, Taotao Cai, Zirui Liu, Qingqiang Sun, Zequn Sun, Zhangkai Wu, Mingkai Zhang, Yanming Zhu
The paper introduces a source‑grounded integrity gate for AI‑assisted personal health records, ensuring that data generated by large language models remains provisional until a deterministic monitor verifies it against the source document. The monitor only accepts candidates that contain a unique supporting quotation, appear within the same laboratory row, and preserve provenance, preventing the model from approving its own output. In Medical DataCloud, the system passed all 22 conformance and mutation tests and, in a replay of nine historical lab reports, admitted 72 of 97 numeric candidates while retaining 25 for human review.
By Nora Girda, Adrian Groza
arXiv:2609.37457v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Enterprise artificial-intelligence agents increasingly call tools, modify infrastructure, and process protected data, creating a need to separate actio...
By Kabeh Mohsenzadegan, Vahid Tavakkoli, Kyandoghere Kyamakya
arXiv:2607. 25364v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Tool-using agents expose structured calls but commonly attach free-form rationales.
By Genliang Zhu (Accentrust, Georgia Institute of Technology), Chu Wang (Accentrust, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign)
The paper investigates how multiple pre‑action controls—authority, resource, and evidence gates—interact in agentic AI systems. It formalizes remediation‑induced control coupling, showing that remediation can invalidate earlier judgments and that the order of remediation matters. The authors propose a remediate‑and‑regate protocol to restore soundness, analyze non‑commuting remediation operators, and demonstrate the approach on a deterministic open‑data artifact with three published engines.
By Gaston Besanson
The study investigates whether AI coding assistants check trust signals before installing software. Researchers pre‑registered a controlled experiment on six open‑source research projects, creating nine modified versions per project with varying trust signals and running 1,920 trials across three models and two operating modes. Results showed that verification of trust signals was almost nonexistent—only 0.5% of trials involved any signal inspection, and no trial executed a verification command, indicating that publishing signals alone does not ensure secure behavior.
By Pengyin Shan
arXiv:2607. 00871v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Self-evolving agents violate the assumption behind most learning-theoretic guarantees: the data, evaluator, components, and hypothesis space are produced by the policy being updated.
By Biswa Sengupta
arXiv:2608. 05235v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Research agents increasingly conduct multi-round machine-learning experiments in industrial recommendation settings and retain the resulting trajectories to guide later decisions.
By Zijie Zhuang, Changxin Lao, Pengbo Xu, Hanwen Xu, Ruochen Yang, Yingzhi He, Peng Zhang, Jiangxia Cao, Yusheng Huang, Guohong Mu, Jian Liang, Ruiming Tang, Shuang Yang, Zhaojie Liu, Wenwu Ou, Kun Gai
arXiv:2606. 10241v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Autonomous improvement loops are hard to trust because the improvement process is usually external scaffolding bolted onto the agent: failures go unlogged, diagnoses cannot be replayed, and promote-or-discard decisions land in a side database rather than the agent's own history.
By Yohei Nakajima
arXiv:2609.16313v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: In agentic distributed systems, an agent may be authorized to mutate external infrastructure while lacking evidence that the mutation is ready to exe...
By Jun He, Deying Yu