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Sprint projectOct 7, 2024

Inference-Time Agent Security

Nicholas Chen · Team Inference-Time Agent Security

Submitted to Agent Security Hackathon. Sprint projects are early-stage work by participants, not Apart Research publications.

We take a first step towards automating model building for symbolic checking (eg formal verification, PDDL) of LLM systems.

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  1. The focus on inference-time safety is both timely and crucial, and this project does a fantastic job of exploring new ways to keep AI agents secure during operation. It’s a forward-looking project that shines a light on how to maintain security as agents perform their tasks, making it a valuable asset in the world of AI safety!

  2. Interesting framework - I’d love to see its strengths and weaknesses explored by application to a real-life use case.

  3. The methodology proposed in this very sound and novel. Combining formal reasoning with AI and “progressively” building world models for Agent security is both innovative and practical. I would love to see some practical use cases/ case studies in future. Some quantitative metrics or benchmarks for evaluating the effectiveness of the safety system would strengthen the idea.

  4. This work proposes an interesting approach to incremental world model building, with the hope of keeping it formally verifiable, and presents a demo. It seems that the strong foundational claim of symbolic reasoning being feasible in agent contruction in the first place remains unexamined, especially when covered by an extra layer of LLM reasoning.

  5. This project presents an intriguing framework for improving the safety of LLM-based agents by incorporating symbolic reasoning and incremental world model building. The integration of neuro-symbolic techniques, leveraging the strengths of both LLMs and formal methods, is particularly promising. The submission is not complete though, just basic ideas in a repo.

Cite this project

@misc{chen2024inferencetime,
  title = {{Inference-Time Agent Security}},
  author = {Nicholas Chen},
  year = {2024},
  month = oct,
  note = {Submitted to Agent Security Hackathon, an Apart Research Sprint},
  howpublished = {\url{https://apartresearch.com/sprints/projects/inference-time-agent-security}},
  url = {https://apartresearch.com/sprints/projects/inference-time-agent-security}
}

Build something like this at the next Sprint

AI Collusion Research Sprint · Oct 23 - 25, 2026