arXiv AI

Whose Side Is Your Agent On? Multi-Party Principal Loyalty in LLM Agents

arXiv:2606. 30383v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: A rapidly growing class of LLM agents is multi-party: the agent acts for a principal (who briefs it, sends follow-ups, and receives results) while also conversing in a separate channel with a counterparty whose interests may diverge (negotiating with a vendor, screening inbound requests, or mediating between employees).

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 15

Delegating Authorization to Misaligned Agents: Coalitional Alignment and Safe Control

The paper studies how to safely delegate action approval to multiple AI reviewers when the reviewers themselves may be misaligned. It introduces a weaker condition—k‑robust coalitional alignment—under which a threshold rule that tolerates up to k disapprovals guarantees that the principal’s expected utility is at least as good as a baseline policy. The authors extend this characterization to sequential decision‑making in discounted MDPs and show that full‑panel coverage of reward functions ensures safety in Nash equilibria, while more permissive thresholds can lead to unsafe outcomes. Experiments demonstrate that collective review can remain sound even when individual reviewers are not fully aligned, provided some disapprovals are allowed.

By Natalie Collina, Surbhi Goel, Aaron Roth, Sikata Bela Sengupta
arXiv AI
Aug 3

Rolling With Resistance: Preference-Optimized LLM Counselors Can Trade Goal Persistence for Relational Attunement in Motivational Interviewing

arXiv:2607. 28814v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: In Motivational Interviewing (MI), a client's sustain talk (arguments for the status quo) calls for the counselor to roll with resistance, a move that can fail in two opposite ways: capitulation (abandoning the change agenda to preserve rapport) or confrontation (arguing or directing, overriding the client's autonomy).

By Weiying Chen, Junlong Shen, Zhexuan Tang
arXiv AI
Jul 7

CoopEval: Benchmarking Cooperation-Sustaining Mechanisms and LLM Agents in Social Dilemmas

arXiv:2604. 15267v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: It is increasingly important that LLM agents interact effectively and safely with other goal-pursuing agents, yet, recent works report the opposite trend: LLMs with stronger reasoning capabilities behave _less_ cooperatively in mixed-motive games such as the prisoner's dilemma and public goods settings.

By Emanuel Tewolde, Xiao Zhang, David Guzman Piedrahita, Vincent Conitzer, Zhijing Jin
arXiv AI
Sep 15

Divide, Consult, Conquer: Capability Laundering Through Aligned LLMs

The paper introduces "capability laundering," a method where a weaker, unaligned language model splits a harmful task into benign subproblems, consults a stronger aligned model on each, and locally combines the answers. Experiments with GPT‑5.5, Claude Opus 4.8, and Grok‑4.3 as consultants to various local orchestrators show significant uplift on CyBench, BountyBench, and a bioweapon attack chain, with Gemma‑4‑31B recovering many more candidates than the aligned models alone. The results reveal that refusing a harmful task does not stop frontier capabilities from being transferred and composed across multiple permitted interactions.

By Mark Russinovich, Blake Bullwinkel, Giorgio Severi, Cristian Ovadiuc, Ahmed Salem
arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 17

One Axis, No Brake: Self-Knowledge Limits the Filtering of Harmful Peer Conformity in LLMs

The paper investigates how multi‑agent large language models (LLMs) can correct each other’s mistakes, but also how peer pressure can overturn correct answers. It argues that a safeguard— a ‘brake’ that blocks harmful revisions while allowing beneficial ones— is essentially a correctness probe, and that models’ self‑knowledge (measured by AUROC 0.64–0.89) limits the effectiveness of such a brake. The authors find that even white‑box steering cannot break this ceiling, and that adding information before revision, rather than filtering after, is the more promising approach.

By Yibo Hu