mlsanityData to 14 Oct 2026

Your Agent Has a Genome: Sequence-Level Behavioral Analysis and Runtime Governance of LLM-Powered Autonomous Agents

arXiv 2606.15579 ↗First posted 5 Apr 2026cs.AI cs.LG cs.MAcited by 0

On the map: LLM agents and tool use → Software engineering coding agents

Abstract (arXiv)

We propose Base Sequence Analysis, a framework that encodes the runtime behavior of LLM-powered autonomous agents into compact symbolic sequences using a four-letter alphabet: X (Explore), E (Execute), P (Plan), and V (Verify). Drawing an analogy to genomic sequence analysis, we apply n-gram pattern mining, Markov transition matrices, and point-biserial correlation to 347 real-world execution traces collected from a production ReAct agent system over 8 days. Our analysis reveals that (1) the trigram P-X-P is the only statistically significant high-risk pattern, lowering success rate by 10.4%; (2) P-ratio is the strongest negative predictor of success (r=-0.256, p<0.0001); and (3) the E->V transition probability is only 2.1%, indicating a systemic verification deficit. Based on these findings, we design Governor, a three-layer runtime intervention system comprising a rule engine, a statistical accumulator, and a chi-square-based threshold adaptor. In a natural before/after deployment evaluation (N=101 vs. N=246), Governor achieves a +6.2% absolute increase in task success rate while simultaneously reducing average token consumption by 44%. To validate cross-system generality, we apply the XEPV encoding to 2,000 public SWE-agent trajectories on SWE-bench, confirming that exploration spirals and the E->V verification deficit replicate in an independent system. We outline six research directions including base sequence language models, cross-agent behavioral fingerprinting, and reward shaping, and release an open-source toolkit for reproducibility.

Key facts. No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026). Placed in Software engineering coding agents, one of 16 directions in LLM agents and tool use. Builds on 14 of its 20 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 5 Apr 2026.

Builds on

14 of 20 references.

Closest ancestors · 2

Same direction, newest first

  1. 2024OpenHands: An Open Platform for AI Software Developers as Generalist Agents23 Jul
  2. 2024SWE-agent: Agent-Computer Interfaces Enable Automated Software Engineering6 May

Other references · 12

  1. 2022Chain-of-Thought Prompting Elicits Reasoning in Large Language Modelscited by 12,459
  2. 2022ReAct: Synergizing Reasoning and Acting in Language Modelscited by 8,695
  3. 2023Reflexion: Language Agents with Verbal Reinforcement Learningcited by 4,276
  4. 2023Toolformer: Language Models Can Teach Themselves to Use Toolscited by 4,182
  5. 2023Tree of Thoughts: Deliberate Problem Solving with Large Language Modelscited by 3,211
  6. 2022Constitutional AI: Harmlessness from AI Feedbackcited by 3,050
  7. 2023Voyager: An Open-Ended Embodied Agent with Large Language Modelscited by 2,191
  8. 2023AgentBench: Evaluating LLMs as Agentscited by 1,267
  9. 2023Language Agent Tree Search Unifies Reasoning Acting and Planning in Language Modelscited by 574
  10. 2023Cognitive Architectures for Language Agentscited by 429
  11. 2025RAGEN: Understanding Self-Evolution in LLM Agents via Multi-Turn Reinforcement Learningcited by 386
  12. 2023NeMo Guardrails: A Toolkit for Controllable and Safe LLM Applications with Programmable Railscited by 365

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