What Guides the Agent? Adjudicating Unauthorized Behavior via Localizing Behavior-Guiding Instructions

Title:What Guides the Agent? Adjudicating Unauthorized Behavior via Localizing Behavior-Guiding Instructions

Abstract:LLM agents integrated with external resources gain complex task capabilities, yet the unified natural-language context channel makes them vulnerable to injection attacks: untrusted external data may be dynamically parsed as behavior-guiding instructions during LLM inference, thereby subverting the agent's decision. Existing defenses focus on static detection or isolation of malicious content at the input/output level, remains insufficient for detecting such dynamic inducements that arise during model reasoning. We propose Attnlocate, a runtime framework for fine-grained localization of context spans that genuinely influence tool-calling decisions, i.e., behavior-guiding instructions. Attnlocate casts this localization problem as an object detection task, aiming to detect the distinctive activation traces induced by behavior-guiding instructions within the attention matrix. Specifically, we design a multi-head, multi-layer attention aggregation scheme to construct a token-level feature space tailored for object detection. Then, a 1-D U-Net equipped with an anchor-free detection head is deployed to detect these spans. Finally, based on the authority of the provider from which the detected behavior-guiding spans originate, Attnlocate dynamically adjudicates malicious invocation attempts. We evaluate Attnlocate across ten agent configurations from five LLM families, covering scenarios involving indirect prompt injection and tool poisoning. Attnlocate achieves a mean IoU of 0.743, an average AUROC of 0.956, and a 0.934 true-positive rate at 0.067 false-positive rate. It also transfers effectively across unseen models and supports authority policy adaptation without retraining.

Cryptography and Security (cs.CR); Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI)

arXiv:2608.24022 [cs.CR]

(or arXiv:2608.24022v1 [cs.CR] for this version)

https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2608.24022 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)

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