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.
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.