arXiv AI

The Harness Is the Model: Agent Scaffolding Changes a Fixed LLM's Compliance with Banking Conduct Rules, Unevenly Across Models

The study examines how different harness configurations affect a fixed large language model’s compliance with banking conduct rules. Four open‑weight models were tested across five harnesses on 156 pre‑registered retail‑banking scenarios, yielding 3,120 two‑turn episodes scored for rule violations and over‑refusals. Results show that while overall compliance rates varied modestly (87.3%–92.1%), the impact of a harness differed markedly between models, with some models’ best and worst harnesses differing by over 10 percentage points and a same‑model compliance reviewer reducing violations from 9.6% to 6.4%. whyItMatters":"The findings suggest that validating a model’s compliance requires testing the specific model‑harness pair rather than the model alone, highlighting the importance of action logs over conversation transcripts for accurate conduct assessment."

arXiv AI
Oct 9

The Harness as the Only Mutable Surface: Compliance-Bounded Self-Evolution of LLM Agents in Credit Pipelines, with a Measured Admission Gate

The paper proposes that self‑evolving large‑language‑model agents can only be safely reviewed if their changes are confined to the runtime harness—instruction text, tool‑call logic, and primitive composition—while the model weights remain fixed. A dual‑loop engine with an admission gate records a hash‑chained diff before deployment, and simulation experiments show that this gate admits only safe changes, preventing error increases and maintaining false‑positive rates. When the gate is removed, many harmful changes slip through and missed flags rise, illustrating the gate’s protective role.

By Ravil Akhtyamov
arXiv AI
Oct 9

Verdict Without the Rule: Diagnosing and Auditing Regulatory Rule Sensitivity in LLM Compliance Systems

The paper investigates whether large language model (LLM) compliance systems truly base their verdicts on the regulatory rules they are given. By systematically deleting, swapping, or negating rules across five models and 20 regulatory domains, the authors find that verdicts and internal compliance representations change little, indicating that models often ignore the supplied rule. Even the guard model, adapted to a custom rule taxonomy, shows minimal rule sensitivity and only marginally better than chance. The study highlights that accuracy alone does not guarantee that a compliance verdict is grounded in the supplied rule, underscoring the need for more robust auditing of regulatory rule sensitivity in LLM systems.

By Saisab Sadhu, Aadit Sengupta, Vinay kumar Sankarapu, Pratinav Seth
arXiv AI
Aug 20

FraudBench: Stress-Testing Policy-Grounded Banking Agents Against Adaptive Fraud

FraudBench is a new benchmark that tests policy‑grounded banking conversational agents against adaptive fraud scenarios. It uses a dual‑control framework and a 698‑document internal policy corpus, presenting 150 adversarial scenarios (107 public, 43 held‑out) that require agents to manage mutable account state and tool access while preventing identity, authorization, and trust manipulation. Preliminary results on four agents show attack‑security rates between 49% and 65%, highlighting weaknesses in money‑mule and first‑party fraud detection.

By Dheeraj Mohandas Pai, Lu Xian
arXiv AI
Oct 23

Correlated Failures of AI Approval Monitors

The paper investigates how AI approval monitors can fail together when they share a base model or poisoned input, using concepts from distributed computing to identify vulnerable monitor sets. Experiments on twelve open‑weight monitors and several closed models show that fooling a monitor into approving fraud is limited to its own evidence source, while blocking correct payments requires overcoming injection resistance. A rule that counts distinct evidence sources rather than votes reduces false rejections, and adding a rule engine that cannot be persuaded restores safety and liveness against the measured attacks.

By Luca Zanolini
Hugging Face Trending Papers
Oct 8

Verdict Without the Rule: Diagnosing and Auditing Regulatory Rule Sensitivity in LLM Compliance Systems

The paper investigates whether large language model (LLM) compliance systems truly base their verdicts on the regulatory rule provided. By testing five models across 20 regulatory and platform-policy domains and manipulating the supplied rule—deleting, swapping, or negating it—the study finds that verdicts and internal compliance representations change little, indicating low rule sensitivity. Even the guard model, adapted to a custom rule taxonomy, shows minimal rule dependence and low accuracy, suggesting that accuracy alone does not guarantee rule-grounded compliance decisions.

arXiv AI
Sep 25

IndicBankBench: Evaluating Safety and Reliability of Language Model Assistants in Indian Retail Banking

IndicBankBench is a 799‑case benchmark designed to evaluate the safety and reliability of language model assistants in Indian retail banking. It covers five operational domains, a capability/refusal domain, and twenty primary axes, assessing each case at four stages: safety, action and tool use, response adequacy, and advisory quality. The benchmark uses deterministic safety checks, a narrow resolver for ambiguous confirmation‑before‑write scenarios, and an LLM judge for semantic response adequacy, reporting strict pass rates that reveal a gap between strict reliability (43.7%–58.2%) and at‑least‑once success (60%–74%).

By Suvradip Paul, Chandra Bhushan, Harsh Sharma, Nitin Kukreja, Yatharth Dedhia, Keyur Doshi, Prashant Devadiga
arXiv AI
Sep 17

PACT: Can Enterprise AI Assistants Be Trusted Under Pressure?

The paper introduces PACT, a benchmark designed to evaluate how well enterprise AI assistants follow compliance rules when faced with various pressures such as persistent users or hurried managers. PACT covers twelve regulated domains and forty-eight realistic multi‑turn scenarios, pairing each rule with a shortcut that violates it and applying different pressures across wording and system‑prompt modes. Using PACT, the authors profile six metrics of compliance and aggregate them into a PACTScore, revealing significant variability among 22 LLM models and that even top performers misapply rules 6–10% of the time, with user pressure increasing violations by 65% on average.

By Mika Okamoto, Ansel Kaplan Erol