Agent Behavioral Contracts
The paper introduces Agent Behavioral Contracts (ABC), a formal framework designed to specify and enforce reliable behavior in autonomous AI agents using principles from software engineering. ABC defines contracts with preconditions, invariants, governance policies, and recovery mechanisms, enabling runtime enforcement and reducing behavioral drift. Evaluated across multiple models and scenarios, the approach demonstrates significant improvements in constraint compliance and violation detection with minimal computational overhead.
- ▪Agent Behavioral Contracts (ABC) formalize AI agent behavior through runtime-enforceable components: Preconditions, Invariants, Governance, and Recovery.
- ▪The framework introduces (p, delta, k)-satisfaction to measure probabilistic compliance and proves that recovery rates exceeding natural drift rates bound expected behavioral deviation.
- ▪Implemented in AgentAssert, ABC detected 5.2–6.8 soft violations per session missed by baselines and maintained hard constraint compliance between 88–100% across 1,980 test sessions.
- ▪ABC provides theoretical bounds on drift and degradation, with empirical results showing behavioral drift D* < 0.27 and recovery rates up to 100% for frontier models.
- ▪The system operates with less than 10 ms overhead per action, supporting efficient deployment in real-world agent systems.
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Record
| Original publisher | arXiv.org |
| Canonical URL | https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.22302 |
| Publication time | Sat, 16 May 2026 11:02:16 +0000 |
| Retrieval time | 2026-05-16T11:10:18.318Z |
| Last seen | 2026-05-16T11:10:18.318Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | JgueFofHTgzc · 2 stories |
| Cluster logic | Grouped by semantic title/content similarity across sources within a rolling window. Same-publisher template collisions are excluded from coverage comparison. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
Rights status (four layers)
WeSearch handling by dimension
| Indexing | May the item be indexed (stored, ranked, made findable)? | Allowed |
| Snippet | May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown? | Allowed |
| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
Computer Science > Artificial Intelligence arXiv:2602.22302 (cs) [Submitted on 25 Feb 2026] Title:Agent Behavioral Contracts: Formal Specification and Runtime Enforcement for Reliable Autonomous AI Agents Authors:Varun Pratap Bhardwaj View a PDF of the paper titled Agent Behavioral Contracts: Formal Specification and Runtime Enforcement for Reliable Autonomous AI Agents, by Varun Pratap Bhardwaj View PDF HTML (experimental) Abstract:Traditional software relies on contracts -- APIs, type systems, assertions -- to specify and enforce correct behavior. AI agents, by contrast, operate on prompts and natural language instructions with no formal behavioral specification. This gap is the root cause of drift, governance failures, and frequent project failures in agentic AI deployments.
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Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at arXiv.org.
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