POLAR is a guardrail framework designed for small tool‑calling language‑model agents that evaluates the reversibility of each action using a two‑layer ontology. By assigning graded reversibility scores and pruning calls that fall below a threshold, POLAR aims to prevent operational risks before they occur. In experiments on the τ²‑bench across six agent models, POLAR increased mean task reward by 0.11 to 0.18 points on airline tasks for four of six agents, though improvements were limited to eight of eighteen model‑domain cells, with some domains showing regression.
LLM tool-use agents operate in dynamic environments where many actions carry operational risk. However, most safety mechanisms react only after errors manifest. Existing pre-emptive approaches either...
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.
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.
arXiv:2606. 15899v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Open-source LLM agent ecosystems are growing rapidly, yet the security of community-contributed skills - modular tool definitions that extend agent capabilities - remains largely unvetted.
arXiv:2608. 02683v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large Language Model (LLM) agents rely on multi-stage agentic workflows, with stages such as memory, planning, and tool execution, to accomplish complex tasks.
HINTBench is a new benchmark for evaluating agents’ intrinsic risk, comprising 596 trajectories (400 synthetic risky, 136 synthetic safe, 30 real risky, 30 real safe) with an average length of 24 steps. It supports three tasks—risk detection, risk-step localization, and intrinsic failure-type identification—using a unified five-constraint taxonomy. Experiments show a large performance gap: while large language models can detect risky trajectories, they score below 37 on strict-F1 for risk-step localization, and existing guard models transfer poorly to this setting.
arXiv:2609.06783v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: LLM agents operate in workflows where unsafe actions can have real consequences. Existing safety evaluations often reduce behavior to a single score,...
The paper introduces INTENT-AS-A-TOOL, a method that equips large language models with intent-targeted tools to provide a fine-grained, judge‑free signal of their commitment to specific behaviors during reasoning. By monitoring the probability of calling these intent tools, the authors can track how intent evolves throughout generation, complementing chain‑of‑thought monitoring and expanding post‑hoc labels into dense trajectories. The approach identifies critical steps for online intervention, demonstrating that action preferences are useful for detecting agentic misalignment in autonomous agents.
arXiv:2606. 09890v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed as autonomous agents capable of executing multi-step action trajectories toward a given objective.
arXiv:2606. 18356v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Tool-using language-model agents introduce security failures that go beyond unsafe text: they can disclose protected objects, write persistent memory, send messages, modify databases, or trigger harmful code and tool effects.
arXiv:2607. 29254v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: AI agents extend large language models (LLMs) with external tools, enabling them to perform complex tasks and translate model outputs into consequential real-world actions.
Large language model (LLM) agents are increasingly evaluated on their ability to use tools, plan multi-step tasks, coordinate with other agents, and operate over extended horizons. Reported benchmark gains often obscure recurring failure modes documented across otherwise unrelated evaluation efforts.