English
Related papers

Related papers: Your Agent May Misevolve: Emergent Risks in Self-e…

200 papers

The deployment of Large Language Models (LLMs) as tool-using agents causes their alignment training to manifest in new ways. Recent work finds that language models can use tools in ways that contradict the interests or explicit instructions…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-24 Kushal Agrawal , Frank Xiao , Guido Bergman , Asa Cooper Stickland

Current safety alignment for Large Language Models (LLMs) implicitly optimizes for a "modal adult user," leaving models vulnerable to distributional shifts in user cognition. We present ChildSafe, a benchmark that quantifies alignment…

Computers and Society · Computer Science 2026-01-21 Abhejay Murali , Saleh Afroogh , Kevin Chen , David Atkinson , Amit Dhurandhar , Junfeng Jiao

Autonomous agent frameworks built upon large language models (LLMs) are evolving into complex, tool-integrated, and continuously operating systems, introducing security risks beyond traditional prompt-level vulnerabilities. As this paradigm…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2026-05-01 Luyao Xu , Xiang Chen

Current Large Language Model (LLM) agents show strong performance in tool use, but lack the crucial capability to systematically learn from their own experiences. While existing frameworks mainly focus on mitigating external knowledge gaps,…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-19 Rong Wu , Xiaoman Wang , Jianbiao Mei , Pinlong Cai , Daocheng Fu , Cheng Yang , Licheng Wen , Xuemeng Yang , Yufan Shen , Yuxin Wang , Botian Shi

Multi-agent systems composed of large generative models are rapidly moving from laboratory prototypes to real-world deployments, where they jointly plan, negotiate, and allocate shared resources to solve complex tasks. While such systems…

Recent advancements in Web AI agents have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in addressing complex web navigation tasks. However, emerging research shows that these agents exhibit greater vulnerability compared to standalone Large…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-23 Jeffrey Yang Fan Chiang , Seungjae Lee , Jia-Bin Huang , Furong Huang , Yizheng Chen

Emergent Misalignment refers to a failure mode in which fine-tuning large language models (LLMs) on narrowly scoped data induces broadly misaligned behavior. Prior explanations mainly attribute this phenomenon to the generalization of…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-02-02 Yanghao Su , Wenbo Zhou , Tianwei Zhang , Qiu Han , Weiming Zhang , Nenghai Yu , Jie Zhang

Large Language Model (LLM)-based agents are increasingly used as autonomous subordinates that carry out tasks for users. This raises the question of whether they may also engage in deception, similar to how individuals in human…

Large language model (LLM) agents increasingly operate in settings where a single context window is far too small to capture what has happened, what was learned, and what should not be repeated. Memory -- the ability to persist, organize,…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-03-10 Pengfei Du

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…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2021-01-19 Jakub Tětek , Marek Sklenka , Tomáš Gavenčiak

Driven by the rapid advancements of Large Language Models (LLMs), LLM-based agents have emerged as powerful intelligent systems capable of human-like cognition, reasoning, and interaction. These agents are increasingly being deployed across…

Most Large Language Model (LLM) agent memory systems rely on a small set of static, hand-designed operations for extracting memory. These fixed procedures hard-code human priors about what to store and how to revise memory, making them…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-26 Haozhen Zhang , Quanyu Long , Jianzhu Bao , Tao Feng , Weizhi Zhang , Haodong Yue , Wenya Wang

Fine-tuning a general-purpose large language model (LLM) for a specific domain or task has become a routine procedure for ordinary users. However, fine-tuning is known to remove the safety alignment features of the model, even when the…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-06-23 Kathleen C. Fraser , Hillary Dawkins , Isar Nejadgholi , Svetlana Kiritchenko

Most agents today ``self-evolve'' by following rewards and rules defined by humans. However, this process remains fundamentally dependent on external supervision; without human guidance, the evolution stops. In this work, we train agents to…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-04-21 Qifan Zhang , Dongyang Ma , Tianqing Fang , Jia Li , Jing Tang , Nuo Chen , Haitao Mi , Yan Wang

The evolution of Large Language Models (LLMs) from passive text generators to autonomous, goal-driven systems represents a fundamental shift in artificial intelligence. This chapter examines the emergence of agentic AI systems that…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-01-07 Nadia Sibai , Yara Ahmed , Serry Sibaee , Sawsan AlHalawani , Adel Ammar , Wadii Boulila

Memory-augmented large language model (LLM) agents use iterative reflection and self-evolution to solve complex tasks, but these mechanisms introduce security risks. Existing agentic memory attacks require privileged access or explicit…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2026-05-20 Kaixiang Wang , Jiong Lou , Zhaojiacheng Zhou , Jie Li

The prevalent deployment of Large Language Model agents such as OpenClaw unlocks potential in real-world applications, while amplifying safety concerns. Among these concerns, the self-replication risk of LLM agents driven by objective…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-04-02 Boxuan Zhang , Yi Yu , Jiaxuan Guo , Jing Shao

Recently, multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have emerged as a unified paradigm for language and image generation. Compared with diffusion models, MLLMs possess a much stronger capability for semantic understanding, enabling them to…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2026-03-26 Ye Leng , Junjie Chu , Mingjie Li , Chenhao Lin , Chao Shen , Michael Backes , Yun Shen , Yang Zhang

Ensuring robust safety alignment is crucial for Large Language Models (LLMs), yet existing defenses often lag behind evolving adversarial attacks due to their \textbf{reliance on static, pre-collected data distributions}. In this paper, we…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-02-09 Xiaoyu Wen , Zhida He , Han Qi , Ziyu Wan , Zhongtian Ma , Ying Wen , Tianhang Zheng , Xingcheng Xu , Chaochao Lu , Qiaosheng Zhang

Autonomous agents powered by large language models (LLMs) enable novel use cases in domains where responsible action is increasingly important. Yet the inherent unpredictability of LLMs raises safety concerns about agent reliability. In…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-05-19 Jan Chojnacki