Instruction Bleed: Cross-Module Interference in Prompt-Composed Agentic Systems
We formalize this as compositional behavioral leakage (CBL): interference between modules sharing a context window. CBL is enabled by architectural non-isolation: transformer self-attention provides no formal boundary between concatenated modules. We probe CBL on a deployed job-evaluation agent (Claude Sonnet 4.6, 144 trials) through a reusable three-channel protocol that perturbs non-focal modules along volume, content, and form.
- ▪We formalize this as compositional behavioral leakage (CBL): interference between modules sharing a context window.
- ▪CBL is enabled by architectural non-isolation: transformer self-attention provides no formal boundary between concatenated modules.
- ▪We probe CBL on a deployed job-evaluation agent (Claude Sonnet 4.6, 144 trials) through a reusable three-channel protocol that perturbs non-focal modules along volume, content, and form.
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Computer Science > Artificial Intelligence arXiv:2606.26356 (cs) [Submitted on 24 Jun 2026] Title:Instruction Bleed: Cross-Module Interference in Prompt-Composed Agentic Systems Authors:Ching-Yu Lin, Yifan Liu View a PDF of the paper titled Instruction Bleed: Cross-Module Interference in Prompt-Composed Agentic Systems, by Ching-Yu Lin and 1 other authors View PDF HTML (experimental) Abstract:Practitioners of prompt-composed agentic systems report a recurring failure mode: editing one prompt module silently shifts the behavior of others despite no shared variable or executable dependency. We formalize this as compositional behavioral leakage (CBL): interference between modules sharing a context window.
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