Search arXivSearch

arXiv · 2609.19391

MAGS: Multi-agent Auto-formalization Guarantees Safety for Agentic Outputs

Abstract

LLM coding agents now generate complex programs at a scale that makes thorough human review increasingly difficult, raising the risk of safety and security failures. Common approaches, including fuzz testing, static analysis, and LLM-as-a-Verifier, can detect many failures but struggle to cover all possible edge cases. Formal verification addresses this by providing machine-checkable guarantees over specified properties, but traditionally demands substantial manual specification and proof engineering. We introduce a unified multi-agent framework, MAGS, that generates executable programs with formal safety guarantees, using Dafny as a verification-aware intermediate representation where safety properties can be mechanically checked. MAGS formalizes and freezes human-audited APIs and safety requirements, translates generated code into Dafny, repairs violations using verifier feedback, and compiles verified programs back into executable code. We evaluate MAGS on 100 CUDA kernels, 100 terminal scripts, and 20 robotic-arm tasks. Across all 220 examples, it achieves a 100% success rate in producing programs with non-trivial safety guarantees against frozen specifications. Independent safety and functional evaluations further show strong performance across all three domains, while revealing failures when the auto-formalized semantics do not fully capture the target behavior.

Explore related subjects

Keep this discovery

Explore connections, maps & timelines

BibTeXRIS

Albert Wu, Nicholas Roberts, Tzu-Heng Huang, Haoran Lin, Gil Friedman, Sungjun Cho, Gabriel Orlanski, Frederic Sala. 2026-09-16. MAGS: Multi-agent Auto-formalization Guarantees Safety for Agentic Outputs. https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.19391

Cite the original work for its findings. Save a collection to share your selection of sources.

KEEP EXPLORING

Related papers

Small Language Models are the Future of Agentic AI

Large language models (LLMs) are often praised for exhibiting near-human performance on a wide range of tasks and valued for their ability to hold a general conversation. The rise of agentic AI systems is, however, ushering in a mass of applications in which language models perform a small number of specialized tasks repetitively and with little variation. Here we lay out the position that small language models (SLMs) are sufficiently powerful, inherently more suitable, and necessarily more economical for many invocations in agentic systems, and are therefore the future of agentic AI. Our argumentation is grounded in the current level of capabilities exhibited by SLMs, the common architectures of agentic systems, and the economy of LM deployment. We further argue that in situations where general-purpose conversational abilities are essential, heterogeneous agentic systems (i.e., agents invoking multiple different models) are the natural choice. We discuss the potential barriers for the adoption of SLMs in agentic systems and outline a general LLM-to-SLM agent conversion algorithm. Our position, formulated as a value statement, highlights the significance of the operational and economic impact even a partial shift from LLMs to SLMs is to have on the AI agent industry. We aim to stimulate the discussion on the effective use of AI resources and hope to advance the efforts to lower the costs of AI of the present day. Calling for both contributions to and critique of our position, we commit to publishing all such correspondence at https://research.nvidia.com/labs/lpr/slm-agents.

cs.AI

EndoCogniAgent: Closed-Loop Agentic Reasoning with Self-Consistency Validation for Endoscopic Diagnosis

Endoscopic diagnosis is an iterative process in which clinicians acquire, compare, and verify local visual evidence before reaching a conclusion. Current AI systems do not adequately support this process because fine-grained evidence acquisition and multi-step reasoning remain weakly coupled, complicating reconciliation of image-derived findings with their textual interpretations. This gives rise to two failure modes, hallucinated evidence and uncorrected error accumulation, that undermine diagnostic reliability. We propose EndoCogniAgent, a closed-loop agentic framework that formulates endoscopic diagnosis as a controlled state update process for integrating complementary visual and textual evidence. At each reasoning round, a central planner selects an evidence acquisition action, specialized expert tools extract spatial and semantic observations as structured textual evidence, and a self-consistency validation mechanism examines this evidence along two dimensions, knowledge consistency against the input image and temporal consistency with prior validated findings, before updating the diagnostic state. Validated observations are admitted into the evolving state to condition subsequent planning, while insufficiently supported or conflicting findings are retained with corrective feedback that redirects the planner toward additional verification. We further introduce EndoAgentBench, a workflow-oriented benchmark comprising 6,132 question-answer pairs from 11 endoscopic datasets, to evaluate diagnostic agents across a comprehensive diagnostic chain, from fine-grained visual perception to high-level diagnostic reasoning. EndoCogniAgent achieves 85.23% overall accuracy on perception tasks and 71.13% clinical acceptance rate on reasoning tasks. Blinded clinician evaluation further shows consistent improvements in diagnostic response quality over the evaluated baselines.

cs.AI

Navigating Taxonomic Expansions of Entity Sets Driven by Knowledge Bases

Recognizing similarities among entities is central to both human cognition and computational intelligence. Within this broader landscape, Entity Set Expansion is one prominent task aimed at taking an initial set of (tuples of) entities and identifying additional ones that share relevant semantic properties with the former, potentially repeating the process to form increasingly broader sets. However, this ``linear'' approach does not unveil the richer ``taxonomic'' structures present in knowledge resources. A recent logic-based framework introduces the notion of an expansion graph: a rooted directed acyclic graph where each node represents a semantic generalization labeled by a logical formula, and edges encode strict semantic inclusion. This structure supports taxonomic expansions of entity sets driven by knowledge bases. Yet, the potentially large size of such graphs may make full materialization impractical in real-world scenarios. To overcome this, we formalize reasoning tasks that check whether two tuples belong to comparable, incomparable, or the same nodes in the graph. Our results show that these tasks are intractable in general, that they remain intractable when the number of input tuples is bounded, and that they become solvable in polynomial time when the descriptions of the entities are small as well. The bounds we establish are tight. This enables local, incremental navigation of expansion graphs, supporting practical applications without requiring full graph construction.

cs.AI