Yang Qu, Qiang Fu, Zonghao Ying, Jiayi Zhao, Yaoyuan Zhang, Jinyang Guo, Jian Yang, Aishan Liu 等 10 位作者
Embodied agents are increasingly deployed in open-world environments, yet current robustness evaluations remain biased toward hazardous instructions and jailbreak vulnerabilities. A more fundamental issue is largely overlooked: agents are rarely tested under semantically sufficient but contextually minimal instructions (i.e., common in real-world human communication), where auxiliary contextual cues are absent. For the first, we identify a novel phenomenon termed Ambient Context Illusion, where agents fail to execute tasks correctly when non-essential contextual details are omitted, despite unchanged task semantics. To systematically study this, we establish VagueBench, a benchmark built upon the AI2-THOR interactive simulation environment for the evaluation of context dependency in embodied agents. We systematically consider key semantic components of instructions (entities, procedures, constraints, and prior knowledge) and derive a unified taxonomy with four categories and nine subtypes to reduce auxiliary information. VagueBench contains 1,303 instruction pairs across diverse indoor environments, constructed via a human-agent co-generation framework that integrates semantic redundancy estimation, taxonomy-guided transformation, and rigorous semantic-invariance verification. Through extensive evaluation on 6 state-of-the-art embodied agents, we observe significant degradation on VagueBench in both task performance and executability (relatively -19.65% in task success rate and relatively +54.10% in empty plan rate) revealing a strong reliance on auxiliary linguistic signals rather than core task semantics. Furthermore, we demonstrate that this phenomenon persists in real-world robotic systems, where it can lead to incorrect decisions and potential safety risks.
Xiao Yang, Aishan Liu, Siyuan Liang, Zonghao Ying, Le Wang, Jiakai Wang, Xianglong Liu, Dacheng Tao
Large language model (LLM) agents increasingly operate in open-world environments where safety risks cannot be fully predefined. However, most existing guardrail mechanisms remain static, relying on fixed rules, prompts, or classifiers that generalize poorly to emerging risks. Here we present EVOLVE, a tool-level self-evolving defense framework that formulates agent security as a process of cumulative security evolution. Inspired by how human societies transform experiences into transferable protective knowledge, EVOLVE externalizes security knowledge into executable guardrail tools that are continuously inherited, independently audited, and iteratively refined through lifelong interaction. Across multiple benchmarks, backbone models, and embodied environments, EVOLVE consistently outperforms existing defenses across diverse risk scenarios with +22\% average F1 score. We further validate the framework in real-world robotic and autonomous agent systems. Our results suggest that scalable agent safety may require continuously evolving defense systems rather than static guardrails.
Yunqi Liu, Peiyu Wang, Bingli Wang, Leo Luo, Xuanwu Song, Xudong Ma, Hongxin Li, Yaxin Du 等 24 位作者
Command-line interface (CLI) agents increasingly execute longer-horizon tasks, yet existing benchmarks either assume that user instructions remain fixed throughout execution or evaluate task outcomes without capturing runtime collaboration quality. In this paper, we present REALCLI, a paired benchmark that unifies the evaluation of task execution and human-agent collaboration quality on realistic CLI tasks. To comprehensively measure collaboration, REALCLI builds a five-dimensional framework, operationalized into 22 sub-dimensions and 51 interaction scenario templates. REALCLI provides two modes for paired comparison: REALCLI-EXEC supplies complete specifications upfront, whereas REALCLI-COLLAB introduces a scripted user that delivers progressive information, corrections, constraint revisions, and authorization decisions. Evaluations reveal profound capability gaps in frontier agents: the best configuration attains an average score of only 49.2%, and when evaluated by the joint collaboration score ($J_{\mathrm{collab}}$), the peak performance reaches merely 37.6%. These results show that task effectiveness diverges sharply from collaboration quality, with models consistently struggling in steerability, trust calibration, and safety boundary management. REALCLI provides a rigorous, reproducible foundation for measuring and advancing collaborative CLI agents.