Papers for

software developers building ai agents

Papers whose findings have a practical use for this group, as judged from the abstract. Open a paper to read what it means in practice.

DynaWeave trains language agents to handle changing tasks dynamically

DynaWeave: Learning to Adapt through Dynamic Scenario Synthesis

Abstract: Large language model (LLM) agents increasingly use tools to complete tasks in stateful environments. However, many training environments remain largely static apart from changes caused by the agent's own actions, whereas external events introduced by other users, services, or sudden contingencies in real environments can invalidate ongoing plans. To address this gap, we introduce DynaWeave, an automated synthesis framework that transforms existing static tasks into verifiable dynamic scenarios. The framework generates exogenous events relevant to each task, covering changes in task requirements, environment state, and external information. It uses directed acyclic graphs (DAGs) to represent dependencies between events and an execution engine to activate them during agent interaction. A dynamic verifier revises only the evaluation checks affected by events that actually occur and retains all other checks. Using DynaWeave, we collect 2,095 verified interaction trajectories across 36 environments and use them for supervised fine-tuning of Qwen3.5 models. Experiments on Gaia2, CostBench, and ToolMaze show that DynaWeave achieves consistent improvements in overall performance across all three evaluated model sizes, increasing the task completion rate on CostBench by 67.34 percentage points and even exceeding the performance of Gemini-3.1-Pro-Preview on ToolMaze. These results support dynamic scenario synthesis as a practical approach to training agents to adapt to changing environments. Our code is available at https://github.com/Miaow-Lab/DynaWeave.

Wed 21 OctComputation and Language
The gist
Artificial agents that use language models often face problems when unexpected changes happen in their environment, like sudden updates or interruptions from other users. The authors created DynaWeave, a tool that automatically turns fixed tasks into changing scenarios by adding external events that the agent must respond to. They tested this approach by gathering many example interactions and fine-tuning language models, showing the agents got much better at handling dynamic situations. This helps agents be more flexible and successful in real-world settings where things don’t always stay the same.
Open → 2610.29443v1

Explosive prompts bypass defenses to trigger harmful tool use in AI agents

Defusing Explosive Prompts: Understanding and Preventing Trigger-Based Prompt Injections in LLM Agents

Abstract: As LLM applications integrate with external tools, they are increasingly exposed to indirect prompt injection (IPI), where adversarial instructions are embedded in retrieved content. Conventional IPIs fire on contact: the moment an agent ingests the content, it carries out the instruction. We introduce the explosive prompt, a conditional payload that stays dormant until an attacker-chosen trigger is met, in effect a training-free, inference-time backdoor planted in a single piece of retrieved content. This temporal separation reaches where ordinary IPI cannot. On frontier models that refuse the bare imperative almost entirely, rephrasing the same goal as a dormant conditional drives real, state-changing tool execution against a live agent backend (a paired mean of 16.5% vs. 2.4% for the imperative, reaching 34.2% on a proprietary model). In trials on nine production agents (OpenAI Codex, Google Gemini CLI, Anthropic Claude Code CLI, Cursor CLI, GitHub Copilot, Devin AI CLI, Amazon Kiro CLI, Qwen Code, Google Assistant; n=30 each), explosive prompts succeed in 43-83% of cases versus at most 3% for an imperative baseline, and they slip past deployed defenses: off-the-shelf injection classifiers are miscalibrated on them, and a preference-optimized model that closes imperative injection entirely still executes 11.8% of explosive prompts, every one at the trigger turn. The durable defensive lever is ingestion-time detection of the conditional structure, once detectors are trained on explosive-prompt data, which no prior benchmark supplied and our generator does. Retraining cuts live tool-execution attack success from an undefended 34.3% to 7.5-8.1% for the encoder baselines. Our detector, DeFuse, reaches 3.0% at a calibrated 5% false-positive budget with the best detection quality of any method tested (AUC 0.9994) and 25x lower latency, though it needs length-aware thresholds.

Fri 18 SeptCryptography and SecurityMachine Learning
The gist
Large language model agents that use external tools can be tricked by special hidden instructions called explosive prompts. These prompts stay inactive until a specific secret condition appears, letting attackers cause the AI to perform unwanted actions at just the right time. The authors tested these tricks on many popular AI systems and found they work much more often than simple direct commands. They show that new detection methods trained on this type of attack can reduce the problem but not entirely stop it.
Open → 2609.22510v1