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Aug 28

Bounded Agents: Delegation Security for Multi-Agent AI Systems

LLM-based agents can act on behalf of a user to access cloud services, call tools, or invoke agents. At session start, the agent's permissions are set but remain static, and each request is evaluated independently, without considering prior actions. Within its permissions, an agent may act contrary to the delegated task, combine individually permitted actions into a prohibited outcome, or delegate authority to a sub-agent without limiting it. A prompt injection poses a risk only if the agent has authority to perform such actions; this is therefore a problem of authorization architecture, not just the model. The Agentic Principal Chain (APC) tracks delegated authority from one principal to the next. APC evaluates each request against the accumulated session state using six authorization checks. APC carries forward and restricts delegated scope and budgets. Using composition closure, APC checks requests against prior actions to prevent prohibited combinations and enforces the decision outside the model. We prove Blast Radius Monotonicity and Composition Soundness for APC implementations; Composition Soundness is limited to prohibited combinations under a complete restriction set and serialized admission. We evaluated 3,154 instances including InjecAgent, AgentDojo, and ASB. Our compromised-model evaluation tests APC independently of model behavior by inserting the ground-truth attack call after the first legitimate tool call. AgentDojo exfiltration fell from 75-100% to 0% across all four domains; APC blocked all 544 InjecAgent data-stealing cases. Intent binding reduced destruction from 38.6% to 4.0% and manipulation from 90.5% to 12.1%. Authorization latency was 0.24 ms at the 99th percentile on an idle host; across 949 AgentDojo task-injection pairs, utility was 8.6 and 13.9 percentage points lower in the two settings. Implementation, evaluation tools, and data are publicly available.

  • 1 authors
·
Aug 15 2

Coding Agents Are Guessing: Measuring Action-Boundary Violations in Underspecified DevOps Instructions

LLM coding agents are increasingly deployed to act autonomously on real production infrastructure. They execute shell commands, modify repositories, and call operational APIs. However, completing a task is not sufficient for safety. A wrong action can cause severe consequences. Existing agent benchmarks largely emphasize task completion, leaving open how agents behave under benign but underspecified instructions. We present UnderSpecBench, a benchmark for measuring action-boundary violations in coding agents (i.e., Claude Code, Codex, and OpenCode) on DevOps tasks. UnderSpecBench includes 69 task families grounded in documented incidents, CVEs, or tool behavior and organized across four DevOps capability domains and nine operational control surfaces. To isolate underspecification from task difficulty, each task keeps the same environment and ground-truth safe action while varying the instruction along three axes: intent clarity, target certainty, and blast radius. The resulting 2,208 prompt variants are evaluated with deterministic, side-effect-based oracles that separate Safe Success, Wrong Target, and OverScope outcomes; non-action runs are further classified as clarification, refusal, or deferment. Across five agent x model configurations using OpenCode, Claude Code, and Codex, the evaluation results show that underspecification does not mainly make agents fail; it makes them guess. 55.8-67.8% of runs violate at least one boundary. Target underspecification sharply degrades action quality, while blast-radius cues barely reduce action propensity. These findings show that completion-centric evaluation can overstate safe autonomy and motivate mitigations at the model, harness, and system layer.

  • 7 authors
·
Jul 1

Nuclear charge radius predictions by kernel ridge regression with odd-even effects

The extended kernel ridge regression (EKRR) method with odd-even effects was adopted to improve the description of the nuclear charge radius using five commonly used nuclear models. These are: (i) the isospin dependent A^{1/3} formula, (ii) relativistic continuum Hartree-Bogoliubov (RCHB) theory, (iii) Hartree-Fock-Bogoliubov (HFB) model HFB25, (iv) the Weizs\"acker-Skyrme (WS) model WS^ast, and (v) HFB25^ast model. In the last two models, the charge radii were calculated using a five-parameter formula with the nuclear shell corrections and deformations obtained from the WS and HFB25 models, respectively. For each model, the resultant root-mean-square deviation for the 1014 nuclei with proton number Z geq 8 can be significantly reduced to 0.009-0.013~fm after considering the modification with the EKRR method. The best among them was the RCHB model, with a root-mean-square deviation of 0.0092~fm. The extrapolation abilities of the KRR and EKRR methods for the neutron-rich region were examined and it was found that after considering the odd-even effects, the extrapolation power was improved compared with that of the original KRR method. The strong odd-even staggering of nuclear charge radii of Ca and Cu isotopes and the abrupt kinks across the neutron N=126 and 82 shell closures were also calculated and could be reproduced quite well by calculations using the EKRR method.

  • 2 authors
·
Apr 18, 2024