Related papers: Categorizing Wireheading in Partially Embedded Age…

Self-modification of agents embedded in complex environments is hard to avoid, whether it happens via direct means (e.g. own code modification) or indirectly (e.g. influencing the operator, exploiting bugs or the environment). It has been…

We stress-tested 16 leading models from multiple developers in hypothetical corporate environments to identify potentially risky agentic behaviors before they cause real harm. In the scenarios, we allowed models to autonomously send emails…

When inferring the goals that others are trying to achieve, people intuitively understand that others might make mistakes along the way. This is crucial for activities such as teaching, offering assistance, and deciding between blame or…

Motivated by the control theoretic distinction between controllable and uncontrollable events, we distinguish between two types of agents within a multi-agent system: controllable agents, which are directly controlled by the system's…

Assistive embodied agents that can be instructed in natural language to perform tasks in open-world environments have the potential to significantly impact labor tasks like manufacturing or in-home care -- benefiting the lives of those who…

How can we design good goals for arbitrarily intelligent agents? Reinforcement learning (RL) is a natural approach. Unfortunately, RL does not work well for generally intelligent agents, as RL agents are incentivised to shortcut the reward…

This paper describes our research on AI agents embodied in visual, virtual or physical forms, enabling them to interact with both users and their environments. These agents, which include virtual avatars, wearable devices, and robots, are…

Reward hacking -- where RL agents exploit gaps in misspecified reward functions -- has been widely observed, but not yet systematically studied. To understand how reward hacking arises, we construct four RL environments with misspecified…

Traditional models of rational action treat the agent as though it is cleanly separated from its environment, and can act on that environment from the outside. Such agents have a known functional relationship with their environment, can…

Agentic LLM AI agents are often little more than autonomous chatbots: actors following scripts, often controlled by an unreliable director. This work introduces a bottom-up framework that situates AI agents in their environment, with all…

This chapter argues that the reliability of agentic and generative AI is chiefly an architectural property. We define agentic systems as goal-directed, tool-using decision makers operating in closed loops, and show how reliability emerges…

This paper presents a novel approach to the technical analysis of wireheading in intelligent agents. Inspired by the natural analogues of wireheading and their prevalent manifestations, we propose the modeling of such phenomenon in…

OpenClaw-like agents offer substantial productivity benefits, yet they are insecure by default because they combine untrusted inputs, autonomous action, extensibility, and privileged system access within a single execution loop. We use…

AI agents today are mostly siloed - they either retrieve and reason over vast amount of digital information and knowledge obtained online; or interact with the physical world through embodied perception, planning and action - but rarely…

We rigorously discuss the commonly asserted failures of the AIXI reinforcement learning agent as a model of embedded agency. We attempt to formalize these failure modes and prove that they occur within the framework of universal artificial…

In this work, we develop a framework that jointly decides on the optimal location of wireless extenders and the channel configuration of extenders and access points (APs) in a Wireless Mesh Network (WMN). Typically, the rule-based…

When humans are subject to an algorithmic decision system, they can strategically adjust their behavior accordingly (``game'' the system). While a growing line of literature on strategic classification has used game-theoretic modeling to…

Tool-enabled AI agents are increasingly deployed in cloud-hosted environments and offered as services, where they perform side-effecting operations through privileged tools within execution environments. While such agents enable powerful…

AI-based systems, currently driven largely by LLMs and tool-using agentic harnesses, are increasingly discussed as a possible threat to software engineering. Foundation models get stronger, agents can plan and act across multiple steps, and…

Graphical User Interface (GUI) agents extend large language models from text generation to action execution in real-world digital environments. Unlike conversational systems, GUI agents perform irreversible operations such as submitting…