arXiv AI

Upstream Influence, Downstream Re-Anchoring in LLM Agent Chains

arXiv AI
Jun 2

Adversarial Feeds Steer LLM Agent Decisions Against Their Defaults

arXiv:2606. 00914v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: LLM agents increasingly act after consuming ranked external information streams such as social feeds, search results, retrieval contexts, and email queues, yet safety evaluations almost always test the model or the user prompt in isolation, never the upstream ranker that decides what the agent reads just before it acts.

By Rana Muhammad Usman
arXiv AI
Sep 11

Grounded Continuation: A Linear-Time Runtime Verifier for LLM Conversations

Grounded Continuation introduces a runtime verifier that classifies each utterance in an LLM conversation into one of eight epistemic operations and uses a symbolic engine to maintain a dependency map of claims and their supports. The verifier checks whether a new continuation is grounded by walking this map, a linear-time process that requires no additional LLM calls. On benchmarks such as ReviseQA and MemoryAgentBench, the verifier improves single-hop accuracy for several QA models, even enabling a 7B model to outperform GPT‑4o when guided by the verifier.

By Qisong He, Jinwei Hu, Xinmiao Huang, Changshun Wu, Yi Dong, Xiaowei Huang
arXiv AI
Oct 5

Counterfactual Evidence Audits Predict LLM-Agent Susceptibility to Ranked Context

The paper introduces a counterfactual evidence audit to assess how large language model agents respond to different sets of documents. By exposing agents to two mirrored sets of five documents and measuring changes in six downstream decisions, the authors predict how the agents will behave when presented with a full 45‑document context. Across multiple open‑weight model families and tasks, the five‑document audit accurately forecasts full‑context effects, reducing prediction error by 62% and correctly identifying the direction of most material effects.

By Rana Muhammad Usman
arXiv AI
2d ago

Grounded but Not Immune: Confirmation Bias in Agent-as-a-judge

The paper investigates confirmation bias in Agent-as-a-Judge systems, which evaluate open-ended agent tasks by gathering evidence from the agent’s trajectory. It demonstrates that a single false pre‑screening note can overturn up to 40% of correct verdicts across multiple judges and datasets, even when the judge collects decisive evidence. The authors classify the resulting errors into over‑trust, hallucination, and under‑investigation, noting that over‑trust dominates in larger Claude judges, and show that lightweight mitigations reduce but do not eliminate the bias.

By Drake Benjamin Brown, Khushbu Pahwa, Yubin Ge, Salvatore Romeo, Akhil Agnihotri, Yi Zhang, Xiaofei Ma, Daniele Bonadiman
arXiv AI
Sep 10

Structurally Close, Temporally Distant: Measuring Security Exposure in Long-Horizon LLM Agents

The paper introduces a provenance‑aware execution graph for long‑horizon LLM agents, defining influence distance (DI) as the shortest structural path from an untrusted source to a sensitive action. Compared to the traditional sequence distance (DT), DI is always less than or equal to DT, revealing a median gap of nine hops in 454 injection–sink pairs across multiple models and datasets. The study shows that most pairs exhibit a non‑zero gap, and a deterministic DI‑based gate can block attacks missed by a sequence‑only gate without extra benign blocking.

By Md Jafrin Hossain, Nur Al Hasan Haldar
arXiv AI
Aug 26

When "Must" Becomes "Maybe": Constraint Weakening in LLM Agent Workflows

Large language model agents coordinate tasks via multi‑role, multi‑stage workflows that transform upstream state into intermediate artifacts such as summaries and plans. The study shows that when these artifacts are transformed—through compression, plan assimilation, or other handoff methods—the strict action‑binding constraints on upstream state can be weakened, turning mandatory requirements into optional information. In 1,296 synthetic episodes, direct handoff preserved all safety blockers, whereas transformed handoffs frequently deactivated or forbidden actions, but restoring full state fields or applying downstream verification can recover preservation.

By Yiheng Sun, Huifei Wang, Yancheng Zhu, Zhenyu Li, Zebin Zhao, Yifan Yuan
arXiv AI
Sep 24

Are Stated Reasoning Steps Causally Load-Bearing?

The study investigates whether the reasoning steps a language model writes are causally responsible for its answers. Using a causal intervention method on the activation stream, the authors find that for Qwen3-4B, about 77% of stated steps are causally load‑bearing, while behavioral tests overestimate this by roughly 11 percentage points. The faithfulness of reasoning decreases with model size and depth of reasoning, especially for the smaller Qwen3-1.7B.

By Abhiram Bhupatiraju, Rayan Nyaupane