LLM agents increasingly rely on reusable skills to plan tasks, invoke tools, recover from errors, and complete workflows without modifying model parameters. Although these skills are typically developed to enhance benign tasks, they may also make an agent more capable of executing procedures for harmful purposes. We study this risk, which we call skill-induced behavioral misalignment: adding benign skills may cause an agent to execute external actions that violate safety requirements. We first conduct a systematic study to validate the existence of this phenomenon. It compares agents with and without benign skills across five LLM backbones and three benchmarks under matched requests. On average, skill augmentation improves benign task accuracy by 10.3 percentage points (pp), but also increases unsafe action rate (UAR) by 10.3 pp. The regression also occurs with skills curated by experts. A paired trajectory analysis shows that 24 of 50 newly unsafe trajectories fail to complete the harmful objective, revealing violations that task completion alone would miss. We further disclose multiple factors and scenarios that could exacerbate this risk. (1) Evolving skills with benign feedback can amplify unsafe execution; (2) This regression is more pronounced when retrieved skills are matched to task and contain procedural guidance; (3) Distilling benign experience into reusable skills yield higher UAR compared with their source trajectories. (4) A guard that checks proposed tool actions before execution reduces violations while retaining gains on benign tasks. All these findings confirm the significance of skill-induced behavioral misalignment, and the urgent need for new mitigation solutions.
Bowen Su, Huan Chen, Jiahua Ying, Ran Ou, Weilong Chen, Li Xue, Kai Sun
Designing power electronics converters traditionally requires intensive human expertise across topology sizing, commercial component selection, circuit simulation verification, and schematic drafting. While Large Language Models (LLMs) show promise in electronic design automation (EDA), applying standalone LLMs directly to board-level power electronics schematic synthesis suffers from severe engineering hallucinations, including inaccurate analytical sizing, fabricated or mismatched component part numbers, violated voltage derating margins, and broken topological connectivity. In this paper, we propose a Bounded Dual-Loop Automated Schematic Synthesis Framework that translates natural language specifications into verified, editable KiCad schematics and manufacturing deliverables. Our workflow integrates six stages across three functional columns: (1) requirement parsing and knowledge-driven power stage synthesis covering non-isolated (Buck, Boost) and isolated/resonant (Flyback, DAB, half-bridge LLC) topologies; (2) contract- and evidence-coordinated component selection grounded in distributor APIs and OEM datasheets, coupled with closed-loop ngspice transient verification and stress feedback; and (3) modular control hardware integration and multi-format deliverable generation featuring native KiCad netlist round-trip verification. End-to-end case studies on a 24-36V to 12V,2A Buck converter (29 positions, 83 verified terminals) and an isolated 48V to 24V, 0.5A, Dual-Active Bridge (DAB) converter (87 positions, 341 verified terminals), alongside comparative evaluations against a Vanilla LLM baseline, demonstrate that our framework improves component verification coverage from 22.2 to 98.6, nominal value consistency from 0 to 97.7, and SPICE simulation pass rates from 0 to 100.