ADF-EA: A Unified Execution Assurance System for Agent Device Foundation

Large language model agents can invoke tools fluently, but enterprise workflows demand more than selecting the right tools: actions must strictly comply with organizational policies, tool feedback often conceals hidden side effects under partial observability, and long-horizon tasks require persistent state tracking across multiple records. To address these challenges, we introduce E-Ledger, a multi-agent harness for safe and persistent execution. E-Ledger employs a code approval layer that checks every proposed action against policy before execution, and maintains a world ledger of verified hidden rules alongside evidence-backed dynamic state. Because hidden rules are typically unknown a priori, we further propose WorldAbduct, an abductive, world-model-driven harness evolution framework. WorldAbduct diagnoses execution trajectories across four complementary views (state consistency, world-observation gap, policy-gate correctness, and goal judgment) to hypothesize latent rules, and verifies them through targeted abductive interactions before integrating them into the ledger. On the enterprise benchmark World of Workflows, E-Ledger with WorldAbduct improves safe task completion across four LLM backbones, outperforming the strongest evolution baseline by 5--15 percentage points. Experiments in ScienceWorld and DiscoveryWorld further show that abductive harness evolution carries over to scientific environments. Our code is available at https://github.com/HKUST-KnowComp/E-LEDGER-WorldAbduct.

Large language model (LLM) agents increasingly issue API calls that mutate real systems, yet many current architectures pass stochastic model outputs directly to execution layers. We argue that this coupling creates a safety risk because model correctness, context awareness, and alignment cannot be assumed at execution time. We introduce Sovereign Agentic Loops (SAL), a control-plane architecture in which models emit structured intents with justifications, and the control plane validates those intents against true system state and policy before execution. SAL combines an obfuscation membrane, which limits model access to identity-sensitive state, with a cryptographically linked Evidence Chain for auditability and replay. We formalize SAL and show that, under the stated assumptions, it provides policy-bounded execution, identity isolation, and deterministic replay. In an OpenKedge prototype for cloud infrastructure, SAL blocks 93% of unsafe intents at the policy layer, rejects the remaining 7% via consistency checks, prevents unsafe executions in our benchmark, and adds 12.4 ms median latency.

In Agentic AI, Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly used in the orchestration layer to coordinate multiple agents and to interact with external services, retrieval components, and shared memory. In this setting, failures are not limited to incorrect final outputs. They also arise from long-horizon interaction, stochastic decisions, and external side effects (such as API calls, database writes, and message sends). Common failures include non-termination, role drift, propagation of unsupported claims, and attacks via untrusted context or external channels. This paper presents an assurance framework for such Agentic AI systems. Executions are instrumented as Message-Action Traces (MAT) with explicit step and trace contracts. Contracts provide machine-checkable verdicts, localize the first violating step, and support deterministic replay. The framework includes stress testing, formulated as a budgeted counterexample search over bounded perturbations. It also supports structured fault injection at service, retrieval, and memory boundaries to assess containment under realistic operational faults and degraded conditions. Finally, governance is treated as a runtime component, enforcing per-agent capability limits and action mediation (allow, rewrite, block) at the language-to-action boundary. To support comparative evaluations across stochastic seeds, models, and orchestration configurations, the paper defines trace-based metrics for task success, termination reliability, contract compliance, factuality indicators, containment rate, and governance outcome distributions. More broadly, the framework is intended as a common abstraction to support testing and evaluation of multi-agent LLM systems, and to facilitate reproducible comparison across orchestration designs and configurations.