The paper investigates a vulnerability in feedback‑based agent planning, showing that the first round of feedback corrects a large portion of adversarial directions (46%) while subsequent rounds see a sharp decline (13% and 7%). The authors attribute this to an initialization anchoring weakness driven by plausible plan shifts, lack of counterevidence, and persistence of accepted directions. They introduce “InitAnchor”, a black‑box attack framework that exploits these factors, achieving high attack success rates across diverse tasks, architectures, and LLMs, and remaining effective against multiple defenses and real‑world agents.
arXiv:2607. 16199v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Multi-agent LLM systems increasingly rely on a Planner to decompose goals into sub-task sequences that downstream Executor and Critic agents execute and audit.
arXiv:2606. 16605v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: World models are widely used in robotic and agentic engineering control systems due to their ability to learn latent dynamics for planning and decision-making.
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...
arXiv:2606. 06529v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: An attacker that strategically chooses when to attack is much harder to catch than one that attacks indiscriminately.
The paper introduces the Environment State-Text Injection (ESTI) attack, a novel method that manipulates the textual representation of environment states in large language model‑driven embodied agents without altering user instructions, model parameters, or executors. ESTI re‑frames adversarial goals as false state evidence that aligns with the current environment, thereby influencing both planning and execution through object properties, spatial relations, affordances, task‑stage rules, and execution feedback. The authors also present ESTI‑Bench, a benchmark that evaluates attack propagation across the planning‑to‑execution closed loop, and demonstrate that ESTI outperforms existing baselines on multiple embodied task datasets, achieving up to 89.32% higher planning‑level and 43.69% higher execution‑level attack success rates.
arXiv:2609.16305v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large language model (LLM) agents increasingly operate over long-horizon interactions involving tool use, persistent state, evolving authorization, and...
Large language model (LLM) agents increasingly operate over long-horizon interactions involving tool use, persistent state, evolving authorization, and external environment feedback. In such settings,...
The paper proposes universal, tool‑based defenses for large language model agents that use external tools, addressing four types of adversarial attacks: direct and indirect prompt injection, memory poisoning, and backdoor attacks. Two main defenses are introduced: Attacker Tool Filtering, which uses anomaly detection to remove suspicious tools, and Normal Tool Recalling, which restores the agent’s original toolset before planning. The authors also add prompt‑based defenses such as Chain‑of‑Thought prompting and self‑reflection, and demonstrate that these methods dramatically lower attack success rates—often to 0%—across multiple open‑source and proprietary LLMs while maintaining or improving task performance.
arXiv:2609.01487v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Skill-augmented agents load reusable skills as persistent runtime context, improving task performance but also giving malicious skills a durable chan...
arXiv:2608. 12273v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: LLM agents increasingly rely on third-party skills, using natural-language descriptions for selection and instruction bodies for planning.
arXiv:2610.00400v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Multi-turn attacks on agentic systems can compose individually permissible actions into harmful outcomes, challenging defenses that assess actions or...
arXiv:2608.30207v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Computer use agents (CUAs) are vision-language models that perceive a screen and act on a real operating system through mouse, keyboard, and terminal...