arXiv:2611.03092v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Personal AI agents are increasingly capable of handling long-horizon tasks across applications, yet users often need to invest substantial effort in...
arXiv:2606. 04321v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Agentic AI deployments face a recurring design tension: heavy human oversight limits scale, while broad autonomy outruns accountability.
The paper presents a unified framework for proactive service agents, defining proactivity as an agent’s ability to infer service opportunities from incomplete signals and decide whether to remain silent, ask, assist, or act. It models this as a partially observable sequential decision process constrained by authorization and risk, integrating timing, content, and delivery into a single structured action. The authors categorize existing methods along a decision pipeline—state and need estimation, intervention gating, action construction, and feedback adaptation—and propose standardized metrics for evaluating triggering, timing, calibration, user burden, safety, and policy value across diverse interaction modalities.
arXiv:2607. 17947v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Existing AI measurement frameworks quantify cognitive capability, task automation, or catastrophic risk, but none measure autonomous agency: the extent to which a system behaves in a self-directed way.
The paper reviews how large language models have evolved into agents that can influence external environments through tool use, interface operation, delegation, state retention, virtual world inhabitation, and robotic control. It critiques the narrative of a single march toward autonomy, distinguishing model competence from system integration, persistence, and safe authority. The authors find that action-interface expansion is well documented, while robust completion, recovery, authorization, and independent verification remain less proven, and they propose a framework of justified delegation to guide future research.
For a decade, progress in artificial intelligence has been measured by how much a machine can do on its own. Large foundation models now write code and run multistep tasks, and personal agents act on...
The paper introduces AuthorizationBench, a benchmark designed to evaluate whether large language model (LLM) agents act within the scope of user authorization when acting on their behalf. The benchmark comprises 286 executable tasks across ten application domains, covering situational triggers, presence or absence of direct harmful consequences, and varying reasoning effort. In experiments with four models and multiple agent harnesses, agents violated authorization in 19.2% of trajectories, with rates ranging from 10.5% to 26.6% across configurations, and increased reasoning effort did not substantially reduce these violations.
arXiv:2606. 23991v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: What is an agent?
arXiv:2607. 18257v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: When AI agents shift from answering questions to taking actions, users face a new problem: deciding what to delegate, to a system whose action space they cannot fully anticipate.
arXiv:2606. 02965v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Benchmarks for autonomous agents measure whether agents complete tasks, yet this framing is systematically blind to whether an agent should have proceeded at all.
The paper "When Agents Act Unwatched: The Reduced‑Supervision Paradox in Agentic AI" discusses how the promise that AI systems will continue acting after users stop watching creates an accountability inversion. It argues that as stepwise supervision recedes, verification shifts into the runtime infrastructure—authority, records, interrupts, outcome checks, and repair—forming what the authors call the reduced‑supervision paradox. A 63‑artifact audit across research papers and engineering sources shows that agents’ action surfaces are more visible than the mechanisms needed to hold them accountable, with tool mediation and monitoring traces appearing in 40 and 37 artifacts, while checkpoint placement, validator independence, recovery, and contestability are rarely visible. "whyItMatters":"The study highlights that observable action paths can replace accountability when verification is moved onto users after meaningful intervention is no longer possible."
arXiv:2606. 30970v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Autonomous AI agents increasingly perform consequential actions on behalf of human principals, including financial transactions, external communications, and enterprise workflows.