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Trust Between AI Agents: Measuring Formation, Breakage, and Recovery, with Implications for Governing Multi-Agent Systems

arXiv:2606.14923v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: As language-model agents increasingly work in teams, each agent must decide how much to trust its teammates. Yet we lack a standard way to measure trust between AI agents. We propose a behavioral measure based on costly verification. In a cooperative survival game, checking a teammate's work consumes resources, while trusting a wrong answer can be fatal. Relative to a memoryless version of the same model, reduced verification provides an observable measure of trust. Using this framework, we study trust formation, breakage, and recovery across six frontier model snapshots. When paired with a consistently reliable teammate, four snapshots (Claude Opus 4.6, Claude Sonnet 4.6, GPT-5.1, and Gemini 3.1 Pro) reduce verification by roughly 60-85%, whereas two smaller snapshots show little or no such adjustment. Failures reverse this discount, but models differ in how they respond. Some concentrate renewed scrutiny on the culprit, while others become more cautious toward the entire team. Recovery is slower than formation, and clustered failures sustain suspicion far longer than the same number of failures spread apart. These differences have practical consequences. Models that form trust verify less, decide more quickly, and achieve higher payoffs in our environment. By contrast, persistent over-verification is associated with indecision rather than safety. Our results show that trust dispositions can be measured before deployment and suggest that calibration, rather than maximal suspicion, should be the central concern in the governance of multi-agent AI systems.

StepGuard: Guarding Web Navigation via Single-Step Calibration

arXiv:2606.17871v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Web navigation requires agents to follow natural language goals, interact with web pages, and produce accurate answers. While recent advances leverage vision-language models and reinforcement learning, existing methods still suffer from single-step fragility due to reward misalignment and error propagation. To tackle the reward entanglement, we design Dynamic Dual-Policy Optimization (DDPO), which dynamically switches between a navigation-first mode for exploration and an answer-first mode for question-answering to mitigate reward conflict. To calibrate the single-step error, we propose Confidence-Guided Adaptive Navigation Reflection (CANR), a mechanism that estimates per-step confidence, triggers reflection only when necessary, and uses contrastive rewards to encourage self-correction to calibrate the single-step inaccuracy. With the above as the main components, we finally develop our StepGuard, a new framework of Guarding Web Navigation via Single-Step Calibration. Experiments demonstrate that our approach significantly improves navigation and answer accuracy, setting new state-of-the-art performance on standard web navigation benchmarks.