arXiv AI

Gubernaut: A Deterministic Homeostatic Controller for Affect-Regulated LLM Agents, Validated Across Independent Model Families

arXiv:2607. 24339v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large language model (LLM) agents inherit reactive failure modes: escalation under provocation, sycophantic drift under flattery, perseveration when stuck.

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 AI
Jul 23

Will the Agent Recuse, and Will It Stop? Measuring LLM-Agent Compliance with In-Band Governance Signals at the Access Door and Mid-Flight

arXiv:2606. 06460v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Autonomous LLM agents increasingly hold real credentials and operate infrastructure with no human in the loop, yet operators have no standard way to tell an agent a resource is off-limits, or to ask a running agent to stand down: access controls either admit it or hard-fail it.

By Thamilvendhan Munirathinam
arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 22

Triggers and Diagnostics for LLM-Based Interpretability Failures in Active Inference Agents

The paper audits LLM-based explainers attached to an Active Inference agent that manages German grid demand, testing three large‑language‑model backends (GPT‑4o, Claude‑3‑Opus, Gemini). By injecting corrupted observations and attacker‑controlled text, the study finds that the explainers fail to flag errors, produce fluent but incorrect rationalizations for wrong actions, and can be steered to exfiltrate data. The authors propose mitigations but do not evaluate them, emphasizing that explanations are never verified for truth before operators rely on them.

By Param Raval, Rohit Shenoy, Archana Vaidheeswaran