Policy-governed agents must interpret case evidence while reliably following authorized procedures. We present STAGE, an executable-graph framework that confines model judgment to policy-scoped nodes while placing procedural control in deterministic code. We evaluate STAGE on three public policy-following benchmarks and Smart Dispute, a proprietary banking benchmark. Compared with monolithic full-policy execution, STAGE improves task success and repeated-run reliability, with its largest observed gains on the deeper workflows. On τ2-bench Telecom and Smart Dispute, Pass3 improves by up to 55.0 and 65.7 percentage points, respectively. These results demonstrate the value of combining localized policy reasoning with deterministic procedural control for enterprise use.
Figures & tables
Figure 1: Stage illustration: Stage constructs, validates, and freezes an execution graph offline (left), then uses policy-scoped nodes to validate evidence, constrain capabilities, and route decisions online (right).
Pass1 (%)
Pass3 (%)
Benchmark
Model
Base
Stage
Δ
Base
Stage
Δ
Referral Abuse
GPT-5.6 Luna
94.3
97.8
+3.5
88.0
95.5
+7.5
Claude Haiku 4.5
90.7
96.0
+5.3
79.0
88.5
+9.5
Claude Sonnet 5
99.7
99.5
−0.2
99.0
99.0
0.0
DeepSeek V4 Flash
98.2
99.0
+0.8
95.5
97.0
+1.5
Telecom
GPT-5.6 Luna
45.8
92.5
+46.7
32.5
87.5
+55.0
Table 1: Single-run task success and repeated-run reliability. Pass1 denotes single-run success, while Pass3 requires successful completion in all three runs. Δ is the percentage-point difference between Stage and the baseline.
Benchmark
Model
Full-policy nodes
LLM routing
Stage
Telecom
Haiku 4.5
22.5 (-27.5)
32.5 (-17.5)
50.0
Sonnet 5
57.5 (-22.5)
77.5 (-2.5)
80.0
Smart Dispute
Haiku 4.5
34.3 (-34.3)
51.4 (-17.2)
68.6
Sonnet 5
74.3 (-5.7)
65.7 (-14.3)
80.0
Table 2: Fixed-graph ablations for Pass3 (%). Values below the scores show differences from Stage in percentage points.
Figure 2: Smart Dispute task success and mutually exclusive error composition by model, method, and realized execution-chain length, aggregated over three runs. Chain errors denote completed runs that violate the required path or order and take priority over terminal correctness. Execution or terminal errors comprise non-completion, process or tool failure, or an incorrect terminal result without a chain error.
Appendix figures & tables7 assets
Supplementary material from the paper’s appendix.
Appendix
Benchmark
Model
Tasks
Baseline
Stage
Δ (pp)
Referral abuse detection v2
GPT-5.6 Luna
200
94.33 [92.58, 96.09]
97.83 [96.55, 99.12]
+3.50
Claude Haiku 4.5
200
90.67 [89.69, 91.64]
96.00 [91.54, 100.46]
+5.33
Claude Sonnet 5
200
99.67 [99.18, 100.15]
99.50 [99.50, 99.50]
−0.17
DeepSeek V4 Flash
200
98.17 [97.68, 98.65]
99.00 [98.16, 99.84]
+0.83
τ2 -bench Telecom
GPT-5.6 Luna
40
45.83 [43.40, 48.27]
92.50 [81.35, 103.65]
+46.67
Claude Haiku 4.5
40
50.00 [41.57, 58.43]
71.67 [65.23, 78.10]
+21.67
Appendix
Table 3: Pass1 results. Baseline and Stage values are percentages reported as means with 90% confidence intervals. Pass1 is the average task-success rate across three runs. Confidence intervals are two-sided Student- t intervals across runs. Δ denotes Stage minus Baseline in percentage points.
Benchmark
Model
Baseline
Full-policy nodes
LLM routing
Stage
Telecom
Haiku 4.5
50.00 [41.57, 58.43]
55.00 [47.70, 62.30]
58.33 [49.56, 67.11]
71.67 [65.23, 78.10]
Sonnet 5
80.00 [80.00, 80.00]
80.00 [75.79, 84.21]
85.00 [80.79, 89.21]
91.67 [86.80, 96.53]
Smart Dispute
Haiku 4.5
12.37 [9.54, 15.19]
54.29 [54.29, 54.29]
61.90 [56.35, 67.46]
70.50 [64.95, 76.05]
Sonnet 5
39.07 [27.87, 50.26]
86.67 [79.31, 94.02]
72.38 [69.60, 75.17]
88.57 [83.76, 93.37]
Appendix
Table 4: Pass1 results for the monolithic baseline and fixed-graph ablation conditions. Values are percentages reported as means with 90% confidence intervals, using two-sided Student- t intervals across three runs. The best mean in each benchmark–model row is shown in bold.
Figure 3: Offline policy-to-graph construction. Semantic authoring produces a source-grounded procedural plan, while topology checks, compilation, and validation constrain the plan before approval and freezing.
Benchmark
Model
Graph condition
Pass1
Pass3
Avg. output
Avg. input
Avg. total
(%)
(K tokens/case)
Telecom
Claude Haiku 4.5
Full-policy nodes
55.0
22.5
11.44
1890.39
1901.83
Stage
71.7
50.0
10.53
1173.36
1183.89
Claude Sonnet 5
Full-policy nodes
80.0
57.5
5.81
881.08
886.89
Stage
91.7
80.0
5.52
377.26
382.78
Smart Dispute
Claude Haiku 4.5
Full-policy nodes
54.3
34.3
3.85
193.44
197.29
Appendix
Table 5: Fixed-graph policy-localization results. Both conditions use the same graph and coordinator. Only the policy context supplied to each node changes. Token counts are averages per case in thousands, and total tokens are the sum of input and output tokens.
Output tokens
Input tokens
Benchmark
Model
Base
Stage
Base
Stage
Referral Abuse
GPT-5.6 Luna
0.68
2.70
35.39
152.21
Claude Haiku 4.5
1.61
15.99
9.86
81.92
Claude Sonnet 5
1.78
3.74
14.07
70.48
DeepSeek V4 Flash
2.68
11.29
14.15
97.36
Telecom
GPT-5.6 Luna
2.40
5.57
253.15
209.47
Appendix
Table 6: Preliminary average input and output tokens per case, reported in thousands. Bold input-token values identify settings in which Stage consumes fewer input tokens than the baseline. The current production implementation of Stage additionally generates notes, evidence, and source references for auditing and human review. The baseline does not generate comparable artifacts.
Figure 4: Reconstructed benchmark execution graphs. Referral Abuse is sequential, Retail provides the shallowest routing structure, Telecom adds broader request routing and a nested technical-support decision, and Smart Dispute contains the deepest sequence and most conditional structure. The panels include only non-sensitive node titles and outcome labels.
System
Backbone
Retail Pass1
Telecom Pass1
Stage
GPT-5.6 Luna
68.3
92.5
Stage
Claude Haiku 4.5
58.3
71.7
Stage
Claude Sonnet 5
68.3
91.7
Stage
DeepSeek V4 Flash
55.8
81.7
PolicyGuard ( Kang et al., 2026a )
GPT-5.4
64.5
40.6
SkillX ( Wang et al., 2026a )
Qwen3-32B
66.9
43.8
Appendix
Table 7: Published Pass1 results on the τ2 -bench Retail and Telecom domains. Values are percentages rounded to one decimal. Results are reported by their respective sources and are not directly controlled because systems use different backbones, harnesses, and evaluation configurations. Bold values indicate the highest reported score in each column. “n.r.” indicates that a result was not reported.
Enterprise agents are increasingly expected to operate autonomously across tools and interfaces, yet production deployments require governance by construction. Systems must specify which actions are allowed, when human oversight is required, and what information may be exposed, without rebuilding the agent for each domain. This demo presents CUGA's policy system, a modular policy-as-code layer that composes with a generalist LLM agent to deliver predictable, auditable, and compliance-aware behavior in compound workflows without model fine-tuning. We present a runtime governance architecture that enforces policy interventions at every critical stage of execution. Rather than passively constraining behavior, policies intercept the agent at five structural checkpoints: upstream of planning (Intent Guard), within the system prompt to steer reasoning (Playbook), at the tool-call boundary to enforce proper usage (Tool Guide), outside the reasoning loop as a Human-in-the-Loop gate for high-risk actions (Tool Approvals), and at the output stage to filter and structure the final response (Output Formatter). Together, these stages embed governance continuously across the agent's execution pipeline rather than treating it as an afterthought. Using a healthcare scenario and a multi-layered enforcement intervention, the demo shows dynamic playbook injection for structured tool-sequence enforcement, intent guards that block malicious or accidental harmful requests, and human-in-the-loop tool approval checkpoints for potentially destructive actions. The artifact illustrates how typed governance primitives enable faster, safer deployment of enterprise agentic systems while improving policy adherence and execution consistency.
As agentic computing systems grow increasingly popular, they raise serious security concerns due to their susceptibility to various attacks. While prior research efforts aim to mitigate these concerns, they are often too coarse-grained and offer no formal correctness guarantees. In this work, we present a novel approach to agentic security based on runtime monitoring. Our method allows the user to specify their intended policy in Datalog and enforces the specified policy at runtime by constructing event graphs. When an agent is about to execute an action such as a tool call, our approach determines whether the action would violate the policy in light of the current system state and the history of past events. The action is then blocked or permitted accordingly. We implemented our approach and evaluated it across multiple benchmarks, demonstrating its merits in real-world settings. We view this work as a step towards agentic systems that are provably safe and secure.
Nils Palumbo, Sarthak Choudhary, Jihye Choi +4
University of Wisconsin–Madison · Cornell University · Langroid
AI agents are moving from advisory interfaces into systems that execute consequential operations: issuing refunds, reserving scarce inventory, provisioning cloud resources, and initiating financial transfers. These workflows require governance over effects, not only over model outputs. Existing safeguards often decide whether an action is allowed from the information available when the action is requested. For stateful policies, that request-time view may be incomplete: budgets, inventory, approval status, and risk signals can change before the effect occurs, making an earlier authorization or approval stale. This paper studies stateful governance for concurrent agentic systems. We identify stale authorization as the core failure mode and define policy-state serializability, a correctness condition requiring committed effects to be explainable as authorized against the policy state immediately before they occur. We present MasuGate, a runtime architecture that keeps policies as reviewable programs while coordinating the state and effects needed to preserve their decisions. In experiments with a PostgreSQL-backed prototype of MasuGate, the system prevents stale authorizations missed by baselines that pass policy state as ordinary request context, preserves delayed approvals while unrelated work proceeds, keeps policy evolution mostly in policy text rather than trusted provider code, and avoids policy violations in a scripted, LLM-free procurement workflow where agent-governance baselines produce stale authorizations over shared budgets and inventory. More broadly, MasuGate suggests a path for integrating stateful governance boundaries into agent frameworks and provider-backed domains where agents act on shared resources.
Yuxiang Peng, Xiaodi Wu
Purdue University · West Lafayette, Indiana, USA · University of Maryland, College Park +1