arXiv AI
Sep 24

Safeguarding LLM Agents against Long-Horizon Threats via Shadow Memory

The paper introduces ShadowMem, a defensive framework that protects large language model agents from long-horizon threats by maintaining a dedicated safety-focused memory. Inspired by the shadow stack concept, ShadowMem stores safety-critical context throughout an agent’s execution and uses this shadow memory to evaluate the risk of upcoming actions before they are carried out. Experiments show that ShadowMem outperforms existing defenses in detection accuracy, detects most attacks early, and adds minimal overhead to agent performance.

By Yuhui Wang, Tanqiu Jiang, Jiacheng Liang, Charles Fleming, Ting Wang