arXiv AI

Auditing Self-Evolution in Financial Agents: Capability Gains, Security Drift, and Execution-Interface Mismatch

The paper audits self‑evolving financial agents—SkillOpt, Agent Workflow Memory (AWM), and ReasoningBank—by evaluating their performance, security drift, and execution‑interface mismatches in simulated e‑banking scenarios. It shows that while utility improves after evolution, exposure to malicious content and unauthorized state changes also rise, and that AWM’s text‑action envelope can disrupt tool execution, highlighting the need for comprehensive auditing beyond accuracy metrics.

arXiv AI
Aug 20

FraudBench: Stress-Testing Policy-Grounded Banking Agents Against Adaptive Fraud

FraudBench is a new benchmark that tests policy‑grounded banking conversational agents against adaptive fraud scenarios. It uses a dual‑control framework and a 698‑document internal policy corpus, presenting 150 adversarial scenarios (107 public, 43 held‑out) that require agents to manage mutable account state and tool access while preventing identity, authorization, and trust manipulation. Preliminary results on four agents show attack‑security rates between 49% and 65%, highlighting weaknesses in money‑mule and first‑party fraud detection.

By Dheeraj Mohandas Pai, Lu Xian
arXiv AI
Aug 7

FinEvo-Bench: A Longitudinal Benchmark for Self-Evolving Agents in Professional Financial Workflows

arXiv:2608. 06144v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Most agent benchmarks evaluate tasks independently and cannot measure whether experience from one task helps with later tasks.

By Bo Deng (Beihang University, Qwen DianJin Team, Alibaba Cloud Computing), Kang Zhou (Qwen DianJin Team, Alibaba Cloud Computing), Lifan Guo (Qwen DianJin Team, Alibaba Cloud Computing), Chongyang Tao (Beihang University), Xuanren Chen (Beihang University), Chenggang Xie (Beihang University), Renzhao Liang (Beihang University), Feng Chen (Qwen DianJin Team, Alibaba Cloud Computing), Chi Zhang (Qwen DianJin Team, Alibaba Cloud Computing)
arXiv AI
Aug 7

When Self-Evolution Backfires: Pre-Commit Gating against Skill Contamination in LLM Agents

arXiv:2608. 05810v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Self-evolving agents accumulate capability by distilling reusable skills from their execution trajectories, but we find this process is not monotonic: past a critical pool size, newly added skills degrade performance instead of improving it.

By Linfang Shang, Ming Xu, Yiding Sun, Tianle Xia, Lingxiang Hu, Lan Xu, Ning Zheng
arXiv AI
Sep 11

AgentAudit: An Open, Extensible Framework for Full-Lifecycle Trust Evaluation of AI Agents

AgentAudit is an open, extensible framework that evaluates the full lifecycle of AI agents, assessing planning, tool selection, execution, memory, and reasoning across ten dimensions such as instruction integrity, security, and alignment. Unlike existing benchmarks that focus on single aspects, AgentAudit analyzes the entire execution trace to attribute failures to specific stages. The framework was tested on five large language models, revealing significant differences in trustworthiness even among models with similar task‑completion performance.

By Shrey Nag, Sachita, Abhishek Kumar Singh, Lipi Goel, Rajeshwar Singh Janwar
arXiv AI
Aug 25

CONTRAMEM: Learning Self-Evolving Procedural Memory from Contrasting Multi-Model Trajectories

arXiv:2608.22533v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Autonomous computer-use agents are increasingly applied to long-horizon tasks requiring coordinated application calls, persistent state tracking, and v...

By Zheyuan Deng, Binghang Lu, Hanqi Feng, Shirley Huang, Dianzhuo Wang, Yuanda Xu, Zhiwei Zhang, Yige Sun, Changhong Mou, Runyu Zhang, Yuexing Hao, Barnabas Poczos, Xiaomin Li
arXiv AI
Aug 21

Credit Without Ground Truth: Auditing Step-Level Credit Assignment in LLM Agents Against Executed Replay

arXiv:2608. 19760v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Audited against causal ground truth from executed replay in a single-agent tool environment (ALFWorld), none of the step-level credit signals used to train LLM agents -- LLM-judge scores, outcome-conditioned logprob ratios, or the policy's own confidence -- identifies which steps causally matter better than chance.

By Haiyue Zhang
arXiv AI
Aug 19

The Acknowledgment Point Is the System: Durable Policy-Decision Receipts for AI Audit Evidence

The paper presents RuntimeGuard‑AI, a prototype that links each deterministic AI policy decision to its source code, writes a privacy‑minimizing record at a chosen synchronization point, and returns an Ed25519‑signed receipt indicating whether the write succeeded. After a crash, the system validates the integrity of records, manifests, shard placement, sequence continuity, and replay identity, while an independent attestation path chains committed records into signed Merkle epochs for auditor verification. Performance results on an Apple M4 Pro show high throughput (up to 27,193 requests/s) with low latency when buffering, but throughput drops and latency rises when per‑record data and full synchronization are used, illustrating a clear durability‑latency trade‑off.

By Neeraj Kumar Singh Beshane
arXiv AI
Aug 19

PACE: Policy-Attested Contract Execution for Safe AI Agents in Decentralized Finance

The paper introduces PACE (Policy‑Attested Contract Execution), a framework that sits between large‑language‑model (LLM) based autonomous AI agents and on‑chain DeFi operations. PACE defines typed transaction intents, a deterministic policy verifier, and signed Policy Decision Records (PDRs) that cryptographically bind an approved intent, policy, and simulation report to the exact on‑chain execution bytes, providing replay and expiration protection. In evaluations across 40 tasks and six baselines, PACE achieves zero unsafe executions and zero false positives, outperforming unguarded agents by a large margin.

By Rabimba Karanjai (Larry), Yang Lu (Larry), Richard Williamson (Larry), Hemanth Hm (Larry), Prakhar Mehrotra (Larry), Lei Xu (Larry), Weidong (Larry), Shi