12 papers
Texture-Aware Strategies for Subregion Style Transfer Augmentation
Cheng Ji, Yu Zhao, Xiaochong Jiang +2
A common strategy for data augmentation is to apply style transfer on training images to enrich appearance variations. Recent approaches have combined style augmentation with rando…
CreepScope: Measuring Post-Use Authorization Exposure in Tool-Using Agents
Haoran Yu, Lifei Liu, Danping Zhang +4
Authorization checks at individual tool calls do not reveal how long earlier authority remains usable. We study this lifecycle failure as privilege creep: a capability stays reacha…
VERA: Authority-Preserving Edge Revocation for Federated AI-Agent Workflows
Lifei Liu, Haoran Yu, Xiaochong Jiang
Modern agent frameworks compose planners, tool agents, remote services, and shared specialists into runtime delegation graphs, but their revocation APIs still resemble token or sub…
When Should Active RAG Retrieve? A Budget-Aware Evaluation of Utility, Calibration, and Cost
Pin Qian, Su Wang, Chong Peng +5
Active RAG systems decide when to retrieve external knowledge during generation, making them a budget-sensitive case of agentic RAG and self-adaptive retrieval. Yet evaluations oft…
Phantom Guardrails: When Self-Improving Agent Harnesses Fix Failures That Never Happened
Su Wang, Pin Qian, Yifan Lin +5
Self-improving AI agents are designed to learn from their mistakes. We show they can also hallucinate mistakes that never happened. We study this failure mode in automated harness…
Operational Reframing and Approval-Framed Delegation in Multi-Agent LLM Safety
Lifei Liu, Haoran Yu, Xiaochong Jiang +3
Safety evaluations of multi-agent LLM systems often compare a direct prompt with a planner-executor pipeline and report the difference as a single "pipeline effect." We argue that…
ChainCaps: Composition-Safe Tool-Using Agents via Monotonic Capability Attenuation
Xiaochong Jiang, Shiqi Yang, Ziwei Li +3
Tool-using agents increasingly operate in open-ended deployment environments, where they compose file systems, web APIs, code interpreters, and enterprise services at runtime. This…
Habituation at the Gate: Rising Approval and Declining Scrutiny in Human Review of AI Agent Code
Haoran Yu, Lifei Liu, Xiaochong Jiang +4
As AI coding agents (e.g., GitHub Copilot, Devin, OpenAI Codex, Cursor) submit pull requests to open-source repositories at scale, a key question arises: do human reviewers gradual…
Beyond Simpson's Paradox: A Cascade of Confounders in AI Agent Pull-Request Co-Authorship
Haoran Yu, Xiaochong Jiang, Lifei Liu +3
Pooled across five AI coding agents, pull requests (PRs) with a human Co-Authored-By trailer merge less often than purely-autonomous ones (53.8% vs. 79.8%) -- yet this aggregate fi…
When Safe Skills Collide: Measuring Compositional Risk in Agent Skill Ecosystems
Su Wang, Pin Qian, Yihang Chen +6
LLM agents increasingly rely on community-contributed skills that expand an agent's operational capability set. We study a core safety problem in agentic AI systems: whether indivi…
An AI-Driven Framework for Energy-Efficient Environmental Monitoring in Smart Cities Using Edge Intelligence
Yichen Liu, Imam Akintomiwa Akinlade, Xiaochong Jiang +2
Environmental monitoring is a crucial component of the smart city infrastructure. It enables informed decision making which enhances sustainability, public health and urban plannin…
SOK: A Taxonomy of Attack Vectors and Defense Strategies for Agentic Supply Chain Runtime
Xiaochong Jiang, Shiqi Yang, Wenting Yang +2
Agentic systems based on large language models (LLMs) operate not merely as text generators but as autonomous entities that dynamically retrieve information and invoke tools. This…