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.
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.
…
Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at arXiv.org.
Discussion
0 commentsMore from arXiv.org
