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Tool-calling agents are increasingly deployed in real-world customer-facing workflows. Yet most studies on tool-calling agents focus on idealized settings with general, fixed, and well-specified tasks. In real-world applications, user…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-04-23 Ziyi Wang , Yuxuan Lu , Yimeng Zhang , Pei Chen , Ziwei Dong , Jing Huang , Jiri Gesi , Xianfeng Tang , Chen Luo , Qun Liu , Yisi Sang , Hanqing Lu , Manling Li , Jin Lai , Dakuo Wang

Third-party skills are becoming the package ecosystem for LLM agents. They package natural-language instructions, helper scripts, templates, documents, and service configuration into reusable workflows. This makes skills useful, but it also…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2026-05-15 Haomin Zhuang , Hanwen Xing , Yujun Zhou , Yuchen Ma , Yue Huang , Yili Shen , Yufei Han , Xiangliang Zhang

Large Language Model (LLM) agents are autonomous systems powered by LLMs, capable of reasoning and planning to solve problems by leveraging a set of tools. However, the integration of multi-tool capabilities in LLM agents introduces…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2025-12-04 Zichuan Li , Jian Cui , Xiaojing Liao , Luyi Xing

The widespread adoption of thinking mode in large language models (LLMs) has significantly enhanced complex task processing capabilities while introducing new security risks. When subjected to jailbreak attacks, the step-by-step reasoning…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2026-03-12 Fan Yang

Large Reasoning Models (LRMs) are increasingly integrated into systems requiring reliable multi-step inference, yet this growing dependence exposes new vulnerabilities related to computational availability. In particular, LRMs exhibit a…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2026-05-15 Shuqiang Wang , Wei Cao , Jiaqi Weng , Jialing Tao , Licheng Pan , Hui Xue , Zhixuan Chu

Human-AI collaboration faces growing challenges as AI systems increasingly outperform humans on complex tasks, while humans remain responsible for orchestration, validation, and decision oversight. To address this imbalance, we introduce…

Human-Computer Interaction · Computer Science 2026-02-16 Yuanrong Tang , Huiling Peng , Bingxi Zhao , Hengyang Ding , Hanchao Song , Tianhong Wang , Chen Zhong , Jiangtao Gong

Tool-calling has changed Large Language Model (LLM) applications by integrating external tools, significantly enhancing their functionality across diverse tasks. However, this integration also introduces new security vulnerabilities,…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2025-06-17 Haowei Wang , Rupeng Zhang , Junjie Wang , Mingyang Li , Yuekai Huang , Dandan Wang , Qing Wang

Prompt injection is listed as the number-one vulnerability class in the OWASP Top 10 for LLM Applications that can subvert LLM guardrails, disclose sensitive data, and trigger unauthorized tool use. Developers are rapidly adopting…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2026-03-24 Charoes Huang , Xin Huang , Amin Milani Fard

Modern LLM agents combine long-term memory for personalization with tool-calling interfaces for taking actions in the world -- a combination underpinning contemporary production systems. We study a previously unexamined failure of this…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2026-05-26 Mahavir Dabas , Jihyun Jeong , Ming Jin , Ruoxi Jia

Recent advances in Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting have substantially enhanced the reasoning capabilities of large language models (LLMs), enabling sophisticated problem-solving through explicit multi-step reasoning traces. However, these…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-08-28 Xinyu Li , Tianjin Huang , Ronghui Mu , Xiaowei Huang , Gaojie Jin

The Model Context Protocol (MCP) replaces static, developer-controlled API integrations with more dynamic, user-driven agent systems, which also introduces new security risks. As MCP adoption grows across community servers and major…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2025-11-27 Herman Errico , Jiquan Ngiam , Shanita Sojan

Autonomous Large Language Model (LLM) agents, exemplified by OpenClaw, demonstrate remarkable capabilities in executing complex, long-horizon tasks. However, their tightly coupled instant-messaging interaction paradigm and high-privilege…

Large language models increasingly operate as autonomous agents that select and invoke tools from large registries. We identify a critical gap: when unauthorized tools are visible in an agent's context, models select them in adversarial…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2026-05-19 Rohith Uppala

Recent advances in LLM Multi-Agent Systems enable scalable orchestration of sub-agents, each coordinating hundreds or thousands of tools or Model Context Protocol (MCP) servers. However, existing retrieval methods typically match queries…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-11-05 Elias Lumer , Faheem Nizar , Anmol Gulati , Pradeep Honaganahalli Basavaraju , Vamse Kumar Subbiah

Model Context Protocol (MCP) has recently gained increased attention within the AI community for providing a standardized way for large language models (LLMs) to interact with external tools and services, significantly enhancing their…

Distributed, Parallel, and Cluster Computing · Computer Science 2025-11-12 Zihao Ding , Mufeng Zhu , Yao Liu

The Model Context Protocol (MCP) has become a widely adopted interface for LLM agents to invoke external tools, yet learned monitoring of MCP tool-call traffic remains underexplored. In this article, the proposed detector is presented as an…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2026-05-25 Sultan Zavrak

LLM-driven agents are capable of selecting external tools to complete users' tasks. However, attackers could compromise such process, steering agents toward inappropriate/wrong tools and enabling malicious actions. Most existing attacks…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2026-05-27 Xuanye Zhang , Yongsen Zheng , Zhuqin Xu , Kaiyu Zhou , Bowen Shen , Haoran Ou , Tianwei Zhang , Kwok-Yan Lam

The model context protocol (MCP) standardizes how LLMs connect to external tools and data sources, enabling faster integration but introducing new attack vectors. Despite the growing adoption of MCP, existing MCP security studies classify…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2026-05-20 Yiheng Huang , Zhijia Zhao , Bihuan Chen , Susheng Wu , Zhuotong Zhou , Yiheng Cao , Xin Hu , Xin Peng

Large Reasoning Models (LRMs) represent a breakthrough in AI problem-solving capabilities, but their effectiveness in interactive environments can be limited. This paper introduces and analyzes overthinking in LRMs. A phenomenon where…

True intelligence requires active capability acquisition, yet current LLM agents inject pre-defined tool schemas into prompts, reducing models to passive selectors and falling short of robust general-purpose agency. We introduce MCP-Zero,…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-06-25 Xiang Fei , Xiawu Zheng , Hao Feng