The paper introduces NAQD‑Env, a synthetic benchmark designed to test language agents’ ability to selectively withdraw and resume actions when new evidence, permissions, or stop instructions arise. It evaluates models against a deterministic reference policy across eleven dependency families, measuring policy agreement, task value, withdrawal, resumption, and event reporting. Experiments on 350 scenarios show low withdrawal recall, no valid resumption, and limited policy alignment, highlighting the need to treat selective withdrawal as a distinct reliability component.
By Mohamed Abouzahra
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
The paper investigates how personalized agents decide to use, ignore, update, or query retrieved user memory before acting on a task. An empirical audit protocol is developed to test structured intermediate outputs, revealing that while exposing state definitions improves accuracy, an explicit state-output field does not significantly enhance policy accuracy for large language models. The study also shows that example-level accuracy overstates consistency, with full four‑way family success being rare, and that providing benchmark‑associated state labels merely conditions predictions rather than proving internal fidelity.
By Yihang Chen, Pin Qian, Su Wang, Chong Peng, Huan Xu, Shuaiting Li, Yiqi Sun
arXiv:2605. 06340v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Continuous post-deployment compliance audits, mandated by emerging regulations such as the EU AI Act and Digital Services Act, create a class of strategic gaming distinct from the one-shot input/output gaming studied in prior work.
By Florian A. D. Burnat, Brittany I. Davidson
Praxa is an evidence‑bound harness for governed AI agent execution that explicitly represents states such as proposal, authority, dispatch, verified external effect, and promotion through deterministic admission, brokered execution, external read‑back, reconciliation, and reviewed promotion. The authors report four evidence lanes: a repository‑local audit passing all unit and Workerd tests; a pilot on 12 curated tasks where both baseline and reliability‑layer arms passed 17 of 36 trials; a coordination‑proxy comparison where both baseline and a source‑authored candidate completed all 180 trials with equal accuracy but the candidate used fewer tokens and steps; and deployed source/configuration evidence showing bounded reflection, recall accounting, memory compilation, and tool‑health paths. None of the evidence demonstrates superiority in security, safety, or user benefit.
whyItMatters:"Praxa provides a testable architecture that makes authority‑to‑effect transitions explicit, offering a framework for verifying AI agent behavior, though current evidence does not prove improved security or performance."
By Stefan G. Creadore
The paper investigates when historical action credit for tool‑using agents must be updated after policy changes. It introduces pairwise branch sensitivity to measure how policy updates affect action‑distinguishing branches, and proposes a first‑order anchored credit‑transport estimator along with a Decision‑Sufficient Credit Gate (DSC‑Gate) to decide whether to reuse, transport, or resample credit. Experiments show that DSC‑Gate reduces new tool steps by 39.4% with negligible impact on regret, demonstrating that many policy updates can avoid costly recomputation of action credit.
By Hongye Yang, Boxiao Huang
The paper introduces a self‑healing harness that enforces admission control over language‑model agents’ self‑modifications. The harness runs a Detect‑Notice‑Heal‑Validate loop, allowing agents to propose rule changes that are only granted persistent authority after demonstrating improvement on a failure case without regressing on protected cases. Across 16 benchmark runs, the harness rejected many locally beneficial proposals that caused collateral regressions, while improving task‑completion scores and reliability.
By Sina Tayebati, Divake Kumar, Nastaran Darabi, Ranganath Krishnan, Amit Ranjan Trivedi
arXiv:2608. 16852v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Regulatory compliance monitoring in deployed language models is increasingly implemented as a legal and audit control, checking model outputs against written rules spanning data protection, healthcare, financial regulation, and platform policy.
By Saisab Sadhu, Aadit Sengupta, Vinay Kumar Sankarapu, Pratinav Seth
ObserverBench is a benchmark framework that evaluates whether internal mechanistic estimators—called observers—are suitable for guiding interventions, control, or safety actions in language models. It separates estimation accuracy from the loss incurred by the chosen action, showing that accurate predictions do not always lead to better decisions. Experiments on GPT‑2‑small, Qwen2.5‑7B, Gemma‑2‑9B‑it, and Qwen3.5‑9B demonstrate that observers trained on action loss can reduce deployment loss, while traditional metrics like AUROC may rank monitors differently from actual performance.
By Vijay Erramilli
arXiv:2609.37501v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: We propose RegLLM, a diagnostic harness for bounded autonomy in regulated agentic workflows. It instruments six trustworthiness signals: citation val...
By Dipankar Sarkar
The paper introduces a protocol for auditing and composing reinforcement‑learning policies using discrete behavioral rules, defining auditability through six testable predicates such as trace integrity and rule coverage. Experiments show that overlapping rule sets do not guarantee behavioral agreement, and that rule‑based fusion often fails to outperform value‑based composition, highlighting limitations in current description layers. The authors provide an evidence‑bounded audit framework and outline future directions for more robust skill composition.
By Liu Hung Ming
arXiv:2605. 09692v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Autonomous language agents increasingly expose traces, memories, plans and constraints, but existing evaluations rarely test whether these state variables are bound to final actions.
By Xiao Jia