arXiv AI
Sep 23

ActGov: Governing LLM Agent Actions via Policy-Constrained Validation

ActGov is a runtime enforcement framework that validates each action proposed by a large language model (LLM) agent before it interacts with external tools, ensuring that actions stay within task‑scoped authorization boundaries and comply with dynamically constructed policies. It builds policies from tool specifications, benign tasks, and failure traces, verifying updates via SMT‑based counterexample checking. In evaluations on AgentDojo and AgentDyn benchmarks, ActGov consistently reduces indirect prompt‑injection attack success while maintaining task utility, outperforming existing defenses.

By Kaiyuan Zhang, Yuke Peng, Ke Jiang, Yinqian Zhang
arXiv AI
Oct 12

Cancerous Backdoor Attack: Gradual Activation via Invisible Tokens and A Stage Controller

The paper introduces the Cancerous Backdoor Attack, a novel backdoor technique for large language models that activates gradually through multiple hidden stages rather than a single trigger-response. It uses invisible tokens to embed intermediate stages into the model’s reasoning process and a stage controller to monitor the attack’s progression during inference. Experiments on various reasoning datasets show that this method consistently corrupts model outputs over time and outperforms existing backdoor baselines.

By Tahmid Imtiaz Imu, Emama Nahid, Prodipta Sen Amartya, Ahsanul Jobayer, Yutong Song, Jiang Wu, Pengfei Zhang, Honghui Xu