mlsanityData to 7 Oct 2026

TrajAD: Trajectory Anomaly Detection for Trustworthy LLM Agents

arXiv 2602.06443 ↗First posted 6 Feb 2026cs.CR cs.AIcited by 13

On the map: LLM agents and tool use → Agent threats, guardrails and governance

Abstract (arXiv)

We address the problem of runtime trajectory anomaly detection, a critical capability for enabling trustworthy LLM agents. Current safety measures predominantly focus on static input/output filtering. However, we argue that ensuring LLM agents reliability requires auditing the intermediate execution process. In this work, we formulate the task of Trajectory Anomaly Detection. The goal is not merely detection, but precise error localization. This capability is essential for enabling efficient rollback-and-retry. To achieve this, we construct TrajBench, a dataset synthesized via a perturb-and-complete strategy to cover diverse procedural anomalies. Using this benchmark, we investigate the capability of models in process supervision. We observe that general-purpose LLMs, even with zero-shot prompting, struggle to identify and localize these anomalies. This reveals that generalized capabilities do not automatically translate to process reliability. To address this, we propose TrajAD, a specialized verifier trained with fine-grained process supervision. Our approach outperforms baselines, demonstrating that specialized supervision is essential for building trustworthy agents.

Key facts. Cited by 13 papers in the map (data through 7 Oct 2026). Placed in Agent threats, guardrails and governance, one of 16 directions in LLM agents and tool use. Builds on 33 of its 36 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 6 Feb 2026.

Builds on

33 of 36 references.

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Same direction, newest first

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Other references · 29

  1. 2022Chain-of-Thought Prompting Elicits Reasoning in Large Language Modelscited by 12,302
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  11. 2022Constitutional AI: Harmlessness from AI Feedbackcited by 2,950
  12. 2023G-Eval: NLG Evaluation using GPT-4 with Better Human Alignmentcited by 2,205
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  11. 2023MedAgents: Large Language Models as Collaborators for Zero-shot Medical Reasoningcited by 311
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  15. 2023FinGPT: Instruction Tuning Benchmark for Open-Source Large Language Models in Financial Datasetscited by 68
  16. 2024AgentBank: Towards Generalized LLM Agents via Fine-Tuning on 50000+ Interaction Trajectoriescited by 56
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Citing papers per year: 2026: 13.

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  1. 2026TRAJDEBUG: Tracing Error Lifecycle to Identify Critical Failures in Long-Horizon Agent Trajectories
  2. 2026ATBench: A Diverse and Realistic Agent Trajectory Benchmark for Safety Evaluation and Diagnosis
  3. 2026AURA-Eval: Evaluation Framework for Acting Under Risk Awareness in LLM Agent Trajectories
  4. 2025TraceAegis: Securing LLM-Based Agents via Hierarchical and Behavioral Anomaly Detection
  5. 2026DeFA: Dependency-Guided Failure Attribution for LLM Agents
  6. 2026When Agentic Executions Fail: Detecting and Localizing Runtime Faults from Telemetry
  7. 2026AgentFixer: From Failure Detection to Fix Recommendations in LLM Agentic Systems
  8. 2026Lightweight, Rubric-Guided Trajectory Evaluation for Production AI Agents