arXiv:2610.33849v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Query-time filters that screen each retrieved document before it reaches the generator are the dominant published defense against retrieval-augmented...
arXiv:2606. 07943v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Agent skills provide a lightweight mechanism for extending general-purpose agents, but their open format exposes them to skill-poisoning attacks.
The paper evaluates safety monitors by measuring recall only on prompts that the target model actually answers, rather than on all harmful prompts. Across several guard systems, recall at a 1% false‑positive rate drops sharply when focusing on answered prompts, with monitors catching refused requests 1.1–6.4 times more often than answered ones. Rewriting prompts to be less explicit dramatically increases compliance and reveals that many harmful requests slip past monitors, especially when phrasing is softened. Fine‑tuning guards on these rewritten prompts improves recall from 0.24 to 0.89 on answered requests and generalizes to unseen benchmarks.
The paper critiques current encoded‑prompt safety benchmarks that focus only on harmful requests, showing that such tests can misrepresent a model’s safety. By evaluating the benign arm under the same encoding, the authors reveal a substantial drop in the harm gap—sometimes to zero—indicating that the encoding masks true safety deficiencies. Across multiple large models and training pipelines, they document that the encoding can either hide or falsely inflate safety metrics, and they identify twelve specific instrument defects that contribute to these misleading results.
The paper evaluates TypeSafe AI’s Jev safety judge against GPT and GLM judges and local classifiers using a controlled adversarial test harness. Jev shows strong robustness on rule‑based tasks like input moderation, with minimal bypasses, but performs less well on judgment‑based tasks such as phishing detection, where it misses a higher proportion of phishing emails and is more prone to false positives. The study highlights Jev’s speed advantage and varying resilience depending on task type.
arXiv:2608.21500v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Prompt injection is listed as the \#1 threat to AI agents. When an agent accesses external data from websites, files, or emails, an attacker may inje...
A self-check defense asks the target model to assess a request before answering it; SAGE, the strongest published instance, reports an average 99% defense success rate. We show it can be breached by composing two attacks that are individually harmless against it: an established code-completion encoding and an established best-of-N search, neither of which exceeds 4.
arXiv:2606. 07943v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Agent skills extend general-purpose agents, but their open format enables skill poisoning: a tampered skill can make an agent run an attacker's command while completing the user's legitimate task.
arXiv:2608. 09624v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Internal safety scores judge a prompt before any text is generated, and they are validated by how well they separate harmful prompts from benign ones.
arXiv:2607. 26639v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: A self-check defense asks the target model to assess a request before answering it; SAGE, the strongest published instance, reports an average 99% defense success rate.
arXiv:2607. 26574v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Safety classifiers ("guards") are the dominant black-box defense for vision-language models, yet a guard judges an input's surface form, not its meaning: a harmful request re-encoded as set theory, formal logic, a classical language, code, or text rendered inside an image slips past a guard that would block it in plain language - the decode gap.
The paper introduces APEX, an active defense for large language model agents that protects against indirect prompt injection by enforcing safety at execution boundaries. APEX uses an evidence‑gated prevention contract and deception‑based exposure to ensure that only authorized effects, endorsed by the task, are executed. Evaluation shows APEX achieves near‑zero attack success across multiple benchmarks and capability‑unit types, outperforming 13 baseline defenses.