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arXiv · 2607.18243

From Agent Failure Paths to Quantified Residual Risk: A Compositional Framework for Resilient Agentic AI

Hassan Karim·Sai Sitharaman·Deepti Gupta·Danda B. Rawat
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Abstract

Agentic AI is crossing trust boundaries faster than current risk models can represent. Existing approaches provide one of two partial views. They either describe failure mechanisms without producing a transferable residual-risk estimate, or they produce a risk estimate while treating the internal failure path as a black box. We couple those two views by proposing CPSAINT, a seven-layer integrity decomposition over Physical state, Sensors, Data, Compute, Actuators, Environment, and Time, paired with FRIESA-K, a residual-risk functional that maps each failure path to a quantified risk instance. FRIESA-K grounds the resistance term K in a controlled absorbing Markov model so that control effectiveness is derived from state dynamics rather than assigned as an informal score. The result is a concise mechanism-to magnitude pipeline for resilient agentic and embodied AI. We report governance observability through a separate additive penalty instead of inserting governance as a new variable in the resistance functional. We formalize structural composability linking valid failure paths to well-defined risk instances and show the framework on two contrasting scenarios a hard real-time warehouse robot and a governance-instrumented financial-services agent. Across both cases, the same layer grammar, variable semantics, and dynamic-resistance construction remain intact. Thus, we obtain a compact kernel that supports cross-domain reasoning, explicit assumptions, and quantitatively grounded formalism of composable trust.

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Hassan Karim, Sai Sitharaman, Deepti Gupta, Danda B. Rawat. 2026-04-28. From Agent Failure Paths to Quantified Residual Risk: A Compositional Framework for Resilient Agentic AI. https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.18243

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