arXiv AI

VEPA: Verified Evolving Formal Policy for Lifelong LLM Agent Guardrails

VEPA is a framework that enables the verified evolution of formal guardrails for lifelong large language model agents. It represents guardrails as formal policies of symbolic rules over typed agent events, and during deployment uses LLM‑guided feedback to propose policy patches that fix new failures while preserving correct behavior. A deterministic verifier accepts only structurally valid, conflict‑free policies, and an evidence‑aware authority layer activates verified rules only when sufficient supporting evidence exists, ensuring that uncertain updates do not directly affect guardrail decisions.

arXiv AI
Sep 23

ActGov: Governing LLM Agent Actions via Policy-Constrained Validation

ActGov is a runtime enforcement framework that validates each action proposed by a large language model (LLM) agent before it interacts with external tools, ensuring that actions stay within task‑scoped authorization boundaries and comply with dynamically constructed policies. It builds policies from tool specifications, benign tasks, and failure traces, verifying updates via SMT‑based counterexample checking. In evaluations on AgentDojo and AgentDyn benchmarks, ActGov consistently reduces indirect prompt‑injection attack success while maintaining task utility, outperforming existing defenses.

By Kaiyuan Zhang, Yuke Peng, Ke Jiang, Yinqian Zhang
arXiv AI
Sep 17

Autonomy in Check: Governor-Mediated Adaptive Security at the Edge

The paper proposes a split‑control architecture for adaptive security at the network edge, where an untrusted planner emits typed security intents that are vetted by a deterministic governor before being enacted. The governor checks each intent against safety, resource, temporal‑stability, and proportionality invariants, issuing signed receipts for admitted actions that are compiled into eBPF map updates. Experiments on a Raspberry Pi 5 connected to a university 5G test network show the governor can admit, reject, and bound intents at microsecond cost without disrupting protected‑flow regularity.

By Ijaz Ahmad, Ijaz Ahmad, Flavio Esposito, Erkki Harjula
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 AI
Aug 7

DreamGuard: Efficient Runtime Guardrail for LLM Agents via Risk-Aware World Model

arXiv:2608. 05695v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: As large language model (LLM) agents increasingly invoke external tools and interact with real-world systems, unsafe actions may cause irreversible consequences on external states, user data, and downstream services.

By Wenhao Lin, Chenyu Yu, Xingwei Lin, Sicong Cao, Xiang Chen, Lei Xue, Le Yu, Letian Sha, Chunming Wu
arXiv AI
Sep 25

Stale Does Not Mean Unsafe: Guard Precision for Tool-Using LLM Agents under Infrastructure State Races

The paper investigates how tool‑using language‑model agents can safely commit changes to infrastructure when external state may change between read and commit. By distinguishing invalidating races from predicate‑preserving and irrelevant ones, the authors evaluate three commit‑time guard granularities—global epoch, read‑set version, and semantic commit predicate—using a deterministic simulator and three quantized model families. The study finds that only the complete predicate guard consistently eliminates unsafe commits, while freshness‑based guards block a large proportion of benign races and model‑side signals fail to replace precise semantic enforcement.

By Zihao Zheng, Jiayu Long, Baichuan Li, Junyi Yao
arXiv Machine Learning
Oct 3

The Alignment Flywheel: A Governance-Centric Hybrid MAS for Architecture-Agnostic Safety

The paper introduces the Alignment Flywheel, a governance‑centric hybrid multi‑agent system (MAS) that separates decision generation from safety governance. It defines a Proposer that generates candidate trajectories, a Safety Oracle stack that evaluates safety, and an Enforcement layer that applies risk policies at runtime. A governance MAS oversees monitoring, red‑teaming, verification, and versioned release management, enabling patch‑local fixes to safety failures without retraining the Proposer. The architecture is implementation‑agnostic and is demonstrated in two scenarios: a learned spatial Oracle and a clinical GenAI proxy. The authors provide open‑source code at https://github.com/decide-ugent/Alignment-Flywheel.

By Elias Malomgr\'e, Pieter Simoens