arXiv:2609.06036v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Proposal-based controllers---learned policies, language-model planners, and other black-box \emph{generators}---are increasingly deployed behind runtim...
By Guangxi Wan, Yongbo Xie, Yuqi Liu, Qingwei Dong, Qingxin Li, Hongfei Bai, Peng Zeng
The paper investigates how tool‑using language‑model agents can safely commit changes to infrastructure when external state may change between read and commit. By distinguishing invalidating races from predicate‑preserving and irrelevant ones, the authors evaluate three commit‑time guard granularities—global epoch, read‑set version, and semantic commit predicate—using a deterministic simulator and three quantized model families. The study finds that only the complete predicate guard consistently eliminates unsafe commits, while freshness‑based guards block a large proportion of benign races and model‑side signals fail to replace precise semantic enforcement.
By Zihao Zheng, Jiayu Long, Baichuan Li, Junyi Yao
arXiv:2607. 13070v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Safety claims on self-improving agent runtimes are almost always self-graded: a policy file, a guardrail, or a README commitment.
By Deepak Soni
The paper proves that algorithmic safety verification for Turing‑complete, self‑modifying systems—whether fixed or recursively self‑improving—is fundamentally limited. Statistically, no verifier can be sound, complete, and tractable across unbounded domains, all finite configurations, or succinctly described finite environments, due to Rice’s, Gödel’s, Trakhtenbrot’s, coNP, and PSPACE barriers. Dynamically, even a single self‑modification step can render safety properties undecidable, and no total supervisory algorithm can guarantee correctness for all such transformations, though a monitor that raises alarms on violations remains feasible.
whyItMatters":"The results show that formal safety guarantees for recursive self‑improvement are unattainable, highlighting intrinsic verification barriers for advanced AI systems."
By Jose Pascual Gumbau Mezquita
The paper demonstrates that safety mechanisms for autonomous large language model agents fail to compose across iterative loops, as trajectory‑scoped monitors cannot detect attacks whose evidence is spread over multiple iterations. It introduces LoopHarness, a system that maintains a persistent, non‑decaying safety state across loops, bounding unauthorized actions with a constant that does not grow with the number of iterations. The authors provide a comprehensive evaluation protocol, including attacks that require cross‑iteration evidence, module ablations, and adaptive white‑box red‑team testing.
By Chenhao Wu, Haoxuan Jia, Yang Liu, Yingguang Yang, Yuhan Lin, Chongyang Zhang, Hao Zheng, Yulin Huang, Jianshen Zhang, Yongzhi Qi, Shang Luo, Kefu Xu, Jifeng Zhu, Bin Chong
arXiv:2608. 11274v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The dominant paradigm treats AI safety as a property to be instilled during model training via RLHF, DPO, or Constitutional AI.
By Albus W. Ng, Yi Han, Jusheng Zhang, Wenhao Wang