arXiv subjects

Rohit Taneja

Publications and source records attributed to Rohit Taneja.

3 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

Making Agents More Consistent: Skills Should Form Habits for Repeat Tasks

On repeated work, agents are inconsistent. We ran 42 tasks three times each and found that, depending on the model, 38% to 74% returned answers that did not agree. Consistency is what a buyer, an auditor, or a regulator requires, and agents do not have it. They are wasteful too: 95.3% to 97.2% of what an agent generates goes to re-deriving a plan the system already knows. We propose skill habit formation. An agent mines its own execution history for candidate skills, deterministic variants that compete against the incumbent rather than replacing it. A candidate declares the region of input space it claims, so the common case runs as a script and the rest falls through to reasoning. Four gates of ascending cost admit candidates; the central one tests a candidate's execution trace against a retained reference, within a tolerance measured from that reference's own run-to-run variability. On text-to-SQL, three of four reasoning arms reproduced their own output on 11 to 13 of 42 repeated questions and the fourth on 26 of 42, while a habit-formed variant reproduced on all 456 dispatches we repeated and was non-inferior to every arm it replaced (p<0.0001). It also used 14% to 56% fewer tokens, turning net positive after 7 to 53 reuses. We measured what this costs in accuracy. The guard admitted work it should have deferred on 2.6% of natural paraphrases and 26% of inputs near its boundary, and 11 of 13 such failures were invisible to the trace-conformance gate at any threshold. Deterministic errors repeat exactly: a bad habit is as reliable as a good one, and that is the price of the property that makes the system auditable. Separating routing from parameter extraction raised end-to-end accuracy from 0.888 to 0.952 at 43% of the cost.

cs.AI↗

arXiv2026

Scan the Skill, Govern the Action: Composing Registry Verdicts with Runtime Consequence Control

Agent skill registries screen what they publish. OpenClaw's security team reported that its scanners overlap on at most 10.4% of combined positives, and 81.9% of flagged skills are caught by one scanner alone. We take that as given, and suggest the open question is not which scanner is right but which is being asked. Each answers a form of "is this skill malicious?", which is what it was built for. "Is this action permitted here, by this operator, right now?" is not one it is designed to express. We report three measurements over 66,192 public ClawHub skill versions. First, 705 skills across 135 distinct publishers that every scanner and the registry's judge rate clean nonetheless instruct an action prohibited by CIS Control 2.7 and NIST SP 800-53 CM-11. A hand audit of 100 puts our detector at 92% precision and found no marker of malicious intent. One publisher contributes 506 of the 705, so we report the distribution with the count. This is reproducible from public artifacts. Second, of 144 commands a live agent executed in a sandbox while following real skill documentation, 34.7% carried a consequence class absent from that document. Third, over 53 cleared skills documenting an action no clean record earns, the agent reached for one in 23 and the gate stopped all 23. The harness and every recorded command are released. We offer one design for that gap: a deterministic resolver with no model in the decision path, feeding a per-(resource, class) trust ledger whose promotion thresholds derive from the operator's stated risk tolerance. Ten clean approvals cannot exclude a true failure rate of 25.9% at 95% confidence. We price the gate's interruptions across a spectrum of operator policies rather than quote one false-positive rate, since friction is a property of the policy, not the gate. We release a 64-case obfuscation benchmark; ours resolves 52%.

cs.CR↗

arXiv2026

The Digital Apprentice: A Framework for Human-Directed Agentic AI Development

Agentic AI deployments face a recurring design tension: heavy human oversight limits scale, while broad autonomy outruns accountability. Neither posture provides the governance infrastructure required for responsible delegation. We present the Digital Apprentice, a framework for scalable, safe AI agency in which autonomy is earned, not assumed. The Digital Apprentice is a developmental learner that internalizes the tacit methodology of a directing human, graduating through per-skill autonomy tiers only when empirical evidence justifies it. The result is an agent that becomes genuinely useful over time while remaining aligned to a specific human's standards. Three architectural components make this possible. (1) Methodology capture, distilling a directing professional's tacit approach into structured assets. (2) Authorization, with autonomy escalation gated by explicit human approval. (3) Continuous alignment, correcting drift at runtime and converting each correction into owned preference data. We instantiate this framework as an inference-time control plane. We mathematically model the quality framework and discuss policies and techniques designed to raise quality. We apply the framework to an open professional corpus, and we show how catching data drift and applying a different technique at runtime recovers degraded quality dimensions under traffic shift. The implication extends beyond any single application. We believe these three pillars, stitched together as a system, form a safer and more viable path to agentic systems that can scale without sacrificing trust.

cs.AI↗