arXiv AI

When Intelligence Becomes Agency: A Theory of Governed, Proactive Agency for Symbiotic AI Systems

arXiv AI
Sep 4

Proactive Service Agents: A Unified Decision Framework, Methods, and Evaluation

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.

By Yan Tang, Tingyu Cao, Yuanbo Tang, Huaze Tang, Keer Hu
arXiv AI
Sep 7

From Language Models to World-Acting Systems: Progress and Limits of Agentic AI across Digital, Social, Virtual, and Physical Environments

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.

By Linsen Zhu, Mengqing Cai
arXiv AI
Aug 12

ComBodied Agents: a New Paradigm of Human-Centric Agentic AI

arXiv:2608. 10915v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: After an older adult misses a medication dose, a software agent can send another reminder and an embodied agent can bring the medication.

By Qianggang Ding, Xingyao Wang, Rui Feng, Zhibin Wang, Feixiang Wang, Kelong Mao, Hao Sun, Zhiyao Luo, Jiankai Tang, Lei Li, Jiadong Guo, Minheng Ni, Weicong Lin, Chenxi Yang, Hongxiang Gao, Zhenghua Chen, Yang Bai, Min Wu, Jun Cheng, Huazhu Fu, Dacheng Tao, Bang Liu
arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 11

Cognitive Digital Twins: Ethical Risks and Governance for AI Systems That Model the Mind

Cognitive Digital Twins (CDTs) are dynamic computational models that represent an individual’s cognition, continuously updated with behavioral, contextual, or physiological data to predict or simulate that person’s mental processes or act as a proxy for communication and decision‑making. The paper defines CDTs, distinguishes them from related systems, and introduces a 5A governance framework—authority, autonomy, access & control, accountability, and availability—to address their unique risks. It identifies specific threats such as misrepresentation, epistemic authority shifts, shadow twins, and proxy‑power asymmetries, and proposes governance requirements for high‑risk CDTs, including stronger consent, purpose limitation, validity, traceability, contestation, independent review, and model retirement.

By Vamshi Krishna Bonagiri, Juan Nicolas Sepulveda-Arias, Abdoul Jalil Djiberou Mahamadou, Monojit Choudhury
arXiv AI
Sep 12

Agent-Integrated Software: Interaction Contracts and Continuous Assurance

The paper introduces Agent-Integrated Software (AIS), a pattern that embeds an intelligent agent within an existing application to address persistent coordination challenges. It defines Intent-Level Interaction Abstraction (IIA) as the task semantics for user inspection and control, and presents interaction contracts that constrain the relationship between AIS execution and IIA states. The authors provide a transition-system model, a compact disclosure contract, and conditional propositions to illustrate how local component validity is insufficient and how admission invariants can be separated from planning, concluding with a research agenda for making agent integration a maintainable software engineering discipline.

By Shengcheng Yu, Chunrong Fang, Zhenyu Chen