mlsanityData to 14 Oct 2026

Benign Alone, Harmful Together: Exploiting Experience Composition in Self-Evolving LLM Agents

arXiv 2608.01759 ↗First posted 3 Aug 2026cs.CRcited by 2

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

Abstract (arXiv)

Self-evolving large language model agents improve their capabilities by distilling interaction trajectories into persistent experiences. Yet this mechanism introduces a new safety risk: experiences that are benign in isolation may jointly weaken an agent's safety boundary when accumulated and reused across sessions. Existing memory attacks typically require direct memory access or induce explicitly malicious records, limiting their stealthiness and applicability. We propose EvoBreak, an experience-conditioned sequential attack that operates through individually benign attack-stage tasks and induced experiences. EvoBreak repeatedly observes the experiences distilled by the victim, identifies uncovered target-relevant requirements, and adaptively acquires complementary experiences before reformulating the final query to activate them jointly. To support training, we introduce BreakGym, a structure-first synthesis pipeline that generates decomposable safety-sensitive targets with diverse dependency structures. EvoBreak is optimized using rejection-sampling supervised fine-tuning and Hint-guided GRPO. Experiments across self-evolving frameworks, victim backbones, pre-evolution domains, and safety benchmarks demonstrate that EvoBreak consistently outperforms existing attacks while maintaining high benignness. These results reveal benign experience composition as a persistent attack surface in self-evolving agents.

Key facts. Cited by 2 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026). Placed in Agent threats, guardrails and governance, one of 16 directions in LLM agents and tool use. Builds on 14 of its 35 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 3 Aug 2026.

Builds on

14 of 35 references.

Closest ancestors · 3

Same direction, newest first

  1. 2026OEP: Poisoning Self-Evolving LLM Agents via Locally Correct but Non-Transferable Experiences18 May
  2. 2026Zombie Agents: Persistent Control of Self-Evolving LLM Agents via Self-Reinforcing Injections17 Feb
  3. 2025MemoryGraft: Persistent Compromise of LLM Agents via Poisoned Experience Retrieval18 Dec

Other references · 11

  1. 2024The Llama 3 Herd of Modelscited by 14,715
  2. 2023Universal and Transferable Adversarial Attacks on Aligned Language Modelscited by 3,104
  3. 2024HarmBench: A Standardized Evaluation Framework for Automated Red Teaming and Robust Refusalcited by 1,429
  4. 2024Understanding the planning of LLM agents: A surveycited by 421
  5. 2025ReasoningBank: Scaling Agent Self-Evolving with Reasoning Memorycited by 284
  6. 2025A Comprehensive Survey of Self-Evolving AI Agents: A New Paradigm Bridging Foundation Models and Lifelong Agentic Systemscited by 183
  7. 2025Evo-Memory: Benchmarking LLM Agent Test-time Learning with Self-Evolving Memorycited by 136
  8. 2024FlipAttack: Jailbreak LLMs via Flippingcited by 80
  9. 2025SE-Agent: Self-Evolution Trajectory Optimization in Multi-Step Reasoning with LLM-Based Agentscited by 69
  10. 2025Beyond Self-Talk: A Communication-Centric Survey of LLM-Based Multi-Agent Systemscited by 62
  11. 2026Controlled Self-Evolution for Algorithmic Code Optimizationcited by 12

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Cited by year (2026 to 14 Oct)

Citing papers per year: 2026: 2.

2 papers.

Similar, not cited

Close in wording, no citation either way

  1. 2026On Safety Risks in Experience-Driven Self-Evolving Agents
  2. 2026MemEvoBench: Benchmarking Safety Risks from Memory Misevolution in LLM Agents
  3. 2026Membrane: A Self-Evolving Contrastive Safety Memory for LLM Agent Defense
  4. 2026SkillJack: Persistent Skill Backdoors in Self-Evolving Agents
  5. 2026Model-Agnostic Lifelong LLM Safety via Externalized Attack-Defense Co-Evolution
  6. 2026Practice Makes Unsafe: Skill Misevolution in Self-Improving LLM Agents
  7. 2026Safety in Self-Evolving LLM Agent Systems: Threats, Amplification, and Case Studies
  8. 2026RAISED: Self-Distillation for Robustness to Prompt Injection in LLM Agents