arXiv AI

Delegating Authorization to Misaligned Agents: Coalitional Alignment and Safe Control

The paper studies how to safely delegate action approval to multiple AI reviewers when the reviewers themselves may be misaligned. It introduces a weaker condition—k‑robust coalitional alignment—under which a threshold rule that tolerates up to k disapprovals guarantees that the principal’s expected utility is at least as good as a baseline policy. The authors extend this characterization to sequential decision‑making in discounted MDPs and show that full‑panel coverage of reward functions ensures safety in Nash equilibria, while more permissive thresholds can lead to unsafe outcomes. Experiments demonstrate that collective review can remain sound even when individual reviewers are not fully aligned, provided some disapprovals are allowed.

arXiv AI
Aug 26

Rules Before Oracles: Auditable, User-Configurable Argument Selection for Deliberative Polling

The paper proposes a transparent, user‑configurable rule for selecting arguments in deliberative polls, replacing opaque learned rankers. It formalises argument selection over bipolar justification sets, introduces seven civic recommender criteria, and presents a one‑hop reversed endorsement flow rule that meets them. Experiments on 17,000 simulated runs show the rule performs comparably to random on coverage but outperforms other methods on endorsement mass and robustness under adversarial pressure.

By Muntaser Syed, Markus Zanker, Marius Silaghi
arXiv AI
Sep 3

The Endogeneity of Miscalibration: Impossibility and Escape in Scored Reporting

The paper examines how an agent’s probability report is evaluated twice—once by a strictly proper scoring rule and again by an approval rule that determines a decision. It shows that when the approval rule is welfare‑maximizing, it cannot be affine, yet the resulting distortion is predictable and can be mitigated by a reserve report that neutralizes the cost of pretending to be the marginal type. A Lipschitz rule with a single kink achieves first‑best welfare, while smooth rules cannot, and the key constraint is the steepness of the rule rather than its smoothness.

By Lauri Lov\'en, Sasu Tarkoma
arXiv AI
Jun 30

Whose Side Is Your Agent On? Multi-Party Principal Loyalty in LLM Agents

arXiv:2606. 30383v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: A rapidly growing class of LLM agents is multi-party: the agent acts for a principal (who briefs it, sends follow-ups, and receives results) while also conversing in a separate channel with a counterparty whose interests may diverge (negotiating with a vendor, screening inbound requests, or mediating between employees).

By Bojie Li, Noah Shi
arXiv Machine Learning
Jul 21

The Behavioral Credibility Trilemma: When Calibrated Autonomy Becomes Impossible

arXiv:2605. 25739v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We prove that no reinforcement learning policy with confidence-gated autonomy can simultaneously achieve maximum helpfulness, optimal calibration, and full autonomy under rational oversight, whenever some tasks exceed the agent's reliable competence: the Behavioral Credibility Trilemma.

By Lauri Lov\'en, Nam Do, Hassan Mehmood, Dinesh Kumar Sah, Sasu Tarkoma
arXiv AI
Aug 19

Collective Counterfactual Planning: Coordination, Consent, and Verification under Representational Constraints

The paper introduces Collective Counterfactual Planning (CCP), a formal model describing how teams coordinate tasks that no single member can handle alone, constrained not by capability but by representational geometry. CCP defines four critical gates—exogenous implementation coalitions, conception, consent, and task-relative verification—that determine whether a team can achieve and legitimately recognize a conjunctive goal. The authors present the Collective Counterfactual Solvability (CCS) problem, separating geometric feasibility, executable attainment, and validated completion, and provide a sound and complete four-step solvability scheme under exact representation of relay closure.

By Chainarong Amornbunchornvej
arXiv AI
Aug 28

Safety Does Not Compose: Non-Decaying Loop State for Autonomous LLM Agents

The paper demonstrates that safety mechanisms for autonomous large language model agents fail to compose across iterative loops, as trajectory‑scoped monitors cannot detect attacks whose evidence is spread over multiple iterations. It introduces LoopHarness, a system that maintains a persistent, non‑decaying safety state across loops, bounding unauthorized actions with a constant that does not grow with the number of iterations. The authors provide a comprehensive evaluation protocol, including attacks that require cross‑iteration evidence, module ablations, and adaptive white‑box red‑team testing.

By Chenhao Wu, Haoxuan Jia, Yang Liu, Yingguang Yang, Yuhan Lin, Chongyang Zhang, Hao Zheng, Yulin Huang, Jianshen Zhang, Yongzhi Qi, Shang Luo, Kefu Xu, Jifeng Zhu, Bin Chong
arXiv AI
Sep 10

PRIMUS: Identity, Governance, and Verification for Multi-Agent Federations

The paper introduces PRIMUS, an extension of the PRIMA framework that combines prime‑power agent identity with BLS aggregate signatures to improve governance in multi‑agent federations. PRIMUS achieves a safe‑kill threshold that eliminates false‑positive agent termination under noisy conditions, identifies an economic boundary where singleton governance outperforms Byzantine quorum, and implements VRF succession with lease and fencing for unconditional safety under partial synchrony. The study also explores converting PRIMA’s binary artifact‑fidelity verdict into a graded fitness signal, demonstrating strong calibration against injected faults but reduced effectiveness on real LLM‑generated candidates, and reports a program cost of USD 164.78.

By Sasank Annapureddy, Anjaneya Prasad Thamatani