arXiv AI

PolicyGuard: A Dialogue-Grounded Sub-Agent Verifier for Policy Adherence in LLM Agents

arXiv:2606. 29225v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: LLM agents handle user requests on behalf of organizations through tool calls and must follow the company policies stated in their system prompts.

arXiv AI
Jul 3

When Should Service Agents Reconsider? Difficulty-Routed Control in Customer-Service Operations

arXiv:2607. 01426v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Autonomous customer-service agents are shifting from conversational interfaces toward operational execution roles: they retrieve firm records, apply service policies, and execute backend writes such as refunds, cancellations, exchanges, order modifications, and reservation changes.

By Qian Chen, Chengyuan Liu, Xin Yu
arXiv AI
Aug 24

Why2Speak: Faithful Reasoning for Abstaining Action Policies

The paper investigates how agentic systems decide between acting and abstaining, focusing on the fidelity of their reasoning explanations. Using Qwen3‑8B in a multi‑party conversation setting, the authors compare direct decision policies, reasoning policies, supervised fine‑tuning, and reinforcement learning, finding a trade‑off: strong direct policies yield higher performance but no traceable reasoning, while reasoning policies provide an audit trail at the cost of lower recall. The study also uncovers that exposing reasoning can alter the agent’s policy and that common faithfulness metrics may overstate the alignment between reasoning and decisions.

By Shreya Mendi, Brinnae Bent
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
Jun 15

Communication Policy Evolution for Proactive LLM Agents

arXiv:2606. 14314v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: LLM agents have rapidly evolved into autonomous systems, yet a persistent information gap remains between users and agents: communication is costly, while users' identical preferences further limit information exchange.

By Xinbei Ma, Jiyang Qiu, Yao Yao, Zheng Wu, Yijie Lu, Xiangmou Qu, Jiaxin Yin, Xingyu Lou, Jun Wang, Weiwen Liu, Weinan Zhang, Zhuosheng Zhang, Hai Zhao
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 Computation and Language
Aug 28

The Cold-Start Safety Gap in LLM Agents

The paper investigates whether tool‑calling large language model agents maintain consistent safety throughout a conversation. It finds that agents are most vulnerable at the very start of a session, with safety improving significantly after completing a few regular agentic tasks—a phenomenon termed the cold‑start safety gap. The authors introduce the Safety Over Depth for Agents (SODA) benchmark to systematically study this effect, evaluate multiple models, and demonstrate that warming up agents with regular tasks before deployment enhances safety while preserving utility.

By Chung-En Sun, Linbo Liu, Tsui-Wei Weng