arXiv Computation and Language

Policy Loopholes in Agent Evaluation: When Policy Ambiguity Masquerades as Agent Error

arXiv AI
3d ago

Trust Is Not a Score: Runtime Assurance Contracts for High-Risk AI Agents

The paper introduces Runtime Assurance Contracts (RAC) as a formal policy framework for high‑risk AI agents, addressing the "assurance‑transition gap" by binding autonomy boundaries, component eligibility, evidence state, transition policy, human‑review capacity, and non‑compensatory gates. RAC allows soft metrics to influence routing while mandating retries, switches, escalations, deferrals, or stops when mandatory gates fail or are unknown, ensuring aggregate performance cannot alone authorize action. The authors define the contract, evidence record, permission rule, and five invariants, and evaluate RAC through deterministic failure‑injection studies, hand‑authored traces, and a prospective synthetic holdout, comparing it to score‑only and restricted protocol baselines.

By Serhii Zabolotnii
arXiv AI
Sep 11

AgentAudit: An Open, Extensible Framework for Full-Lifecycle Trust Evaluation of AI Agents

AgentAudit is an open, extensible framework that evaluates the full lifecycle of AI agents, assessing planning, tool selection, execution, memory, and reasoning across ten dimensions such as instruction integrity, security, and alignment. Unlike existing benchmarks that focus on single aspects, AgentAudit analyzes the entire execution trace to attribute failures to specific stages. The framework was tested on five large language models, revealing significant differences in trustworthiness even among models with similar task‑completion performance.

By Shrey Nag, Sachita, Abhishek Kumar Singh, Lipi Goel, Rajeshwar Singh Janwar
arXiv AI
Jul 2

Adversarial Pragmatics for AI Safety Evaluation: A Benchmark for Instruction Conflict, Embedded Commands, and Policy Ambiguity

arXiv:2607. 01153v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Safety evaluations for language models increasingly depend on judgments about ambiguous natural-language behaviour: whether a model has followed an instruction, refused appropriately, complied with a policy, resisted an embedded command, or misreported progress in an agentic task.

By Brett Reynolds
arXiv AI
Sep 17

Compositional Policy Violations: When Step-Level Compliance Fails In Agentic AI Workflows

The paper introduces the concept of Compositional Policy Violations (CPVs), where each step in an agentic AI workflow passes its individual compliance check, yet the overall execution violates higher‑level policies such as referral thresholds or authority limits. It categorizes CPVs into four types—Authority Creep, Threshold Laundering, Cumulative Sum Violation, and Context Collapse—and argues that the appropriate remedy depends on where the guarded quantity changes. To address this, the authors propose a provenance‑aware runtime architecture that evaluates policies over complete execution traces, recomputing guarded quantities from raw provenance rather than relying on step‑level outputs.

By Ashwini Kurady, Sri Sai Charith Grandhi, Rajesh Gupta, Sumit Mamoria