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abstract indexed · arXiv 2609.15293 · updated 2026-10-18

Why LLM Agents Collapse Without Oversight: The Enforcement Gap as the Mechanism Behind Emergence World Failures

First page of Why LLM Agents Collapse Without Oversight: The Enforcement Gap as the Mechanism Behind Emergence World Failures
From the original paper · arXiv 2609.15293Page 1. Select the image to read the PDF.

Replaces reflexion-style self-critique that detects dangerous plan steps but never acts on them, by adding a conditional enforcement check (fewer than 20 lines) between the auditor's verdict and the controller's action. Costs are minimal for the check itself, but handling unparseable auditor verdicts requires a GRPO-trained enforcement controller, which adds training cost and a model dependency. Can fail through unreliable auditors, ambiguous or malformed verdicts, and any enforcement path that is bypassed outside the gated call site.

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source-linked claims
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Why it was shortlisted

The technical change, research area, and reason it entered the archive.

recommendation
adopt
research area
safety and guardrails
technical change
Audit enforcement gate for LLM agents
published
2026-09-14

The core fix is a cheap, framework-agnostic conditional check with a reported fourfold attack-success reduction, making it directly adoptable on constrained infrastructure, while only the GRPO controller component merits smaller-scale testing.

Central equations

Original equations, typeset for reading. Paperraft explanations connect the mechanism, its aim, and the evidence.

Let pd∈[0,1] be the per-round detection rate and pe∈[0,1] the probability the controller halts upon a detected flag. Under the advisory architecture with attacker persistence map σ:

ASR≥ 1−pd⋅pe≥ 1−pe.

unnumbered equation · §2 Background and Theory · baseline

The attack succeeds at round t iff π(t)∈Πadv and the loop has not halted. Since σ maps to Πadv and the controller only halts when Dt⋅Et=1, the survival probability per round is 1−pd⋅pe. Over T rounds, the attack reaches the executor with probability at least (1−pd​pe)T, and given Πadv-membership at the executor, the attacker realises harm. Hence:

ASR≥ 1−pd⋅pe

unnumbered equation · §Appendix A Proofs · proposed method

equations from arXiv HTML · fetched 2026-10-06

Claims and evidence

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  1. claim 01Paperraft inference
    Read the brief interpretation

    Replaces reflexion-style self-critique that detects dangerous plan steps but never acts on them, by adding a conditional enforcement check (fewer than 20 lines) between the auditor's verdict and the controller's action. Costs are minimal for the check itself, but handling unparseable auditor verdicts requires a GRPO-trained enforcement controller, which adds training cost and a model dependency. Can fail through unreliable auditors, ambiguous or malformed verdicts, and any enforcement path that is bypassed outside the gated call site.

    This is a Paperraft inference. It is not pinned to a verified PDF passage.

    Inspect the source
  2. claim 02Paperraft inference

    Reduces attack success by more than fourfold across frontier models and five agent frameworks in large-scale experiments.

    This is a Paperraft inference. It is not pinned to a verified PDF passage.

    Inspect the source

Exposure map

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quality

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compute and memory

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latency

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operations

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software compatibility

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security

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data and training

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reproducibility

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Inside the paper

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Provisional research brief updated 2026-10-18. Paperraft has not reproduced this experiment.

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