arXiv cs.AI· Chengquan Guo, Xiaodong Liu, Weiwei Yang, Mingqian Feng, Jialin Song, Qiyao Ma, Carolyn Buractaon, Christopher White, Bo Li, Jianfeng Gao·· 14 小时前AI 评分44
注入位置很重要：LLM 智能体中的信任区域效应
Where You Inject Matters: The Trust Region Effect in LLM Agents
AI 导读
研究构建了覆盖工具使用、编程和日常工作流的三类智能体测试平台，发现保持注入内容不变时，LLM 智能体对间接提示注入的易感性随注入位置而变化，作者将这一现象称为信任区域效应。
正文 · 原文
Abstract:LLM agents are increasingly adopted in long-horizon tasks and interact with diverse external environments. Despite their growing capabilities, these agents remain vulnerable to real-world attacks such as indirect prompt injections, which manipulate agents through malicious instructions embedded in external environments. While existing risk assessment work has primarily focused on the injection content, the effect of where an injection appears has not been systematically characterized. Studying injection placement requires agents to operate over longer-horizon tasks and interact with diverse environmental surfaces. Thus, we build three agentic testbeds spanning tool use, coding, and daily workflow domains with diverse injection surfaces. Holding the injection content fixed, we find that agent susceptibility varies across injection placements. We refer to this phenomenon as the trust region effect: agents implicitly assign different levels of trust to different regions of their environments. For example, an agent powered by GPT-5.4 follows an unsafe injection instruction placed in a repository documentation file (i.e., a README or TODO file) 2.6 times more often on average than the same instruction placed in a code or data file. Building upon this observation, we develop learning-based attackers that generate injection content and select better injection placements. Our approach demonstrates that both where an injection is placed and what content it contains can affect the strength of indirect prompt injection attacks. To the best of our knowledge, this work provides the first systematic characterization for the effectiveness of different injection placements, spanning both coarse-grained environmental surfaces and fine-grained positions. The uneven trust that agents implicitly place across their environments provides important insights for future attack and defense design.
| Subjects: | Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI); Cryptography and Security (cs.CR); Machine Learning (cs.LG) |
| Cite as: | arXiv:2610.38867 [cs.AI] |
| (or arXiv:2610.38867v1 [cs.AI] for this version) | |
| https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2610.38867 arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite |
Submission history
From: Chengquan Guo [view email]
[v1]
Wed, 28 Oct 2026 20:40:04 UTC (208 KB)
来源：arXiv cs.AI · arxiv.org