STARS: Skill-Triggered Audit for Request-Conditioned Invocation Safety in Agent Systems

TL;DR

STARS introduces a method for continuous risk estimation of skill invocations in autonomous agents, combining static and dynamic analysis to improve safety and triage decisions.

Contribution

The paper presents STARS, a novel approach integrating static priors and request-conditioned risk models for real-time invocation safety assessment.

Findings

Calibrated fusion achieves 0.439 high-risk AUPRC on attack detection.

Contextual scorer outperforms static baseline in risk calibration.

Request-conditioned auditing is most effective as an invocation-time risk layer.

Abstract

Autonomous language-model agents increasingly rely on installable skills and tools to complete user tasks. Static skill auditing can expose capability surface before deployment, but it cannot determine whether a particular invocation is unsafe under the current user request and runtime context. We therefore study skill invocation auditing as a continuous-risk estimation problem: given a user request, candidate skill, and runtime context, predict a score that supports ranking and triage before a hard intervention is applied. We introduce STARS, which combines a static capability prior, a request-conditioned invocation risk model, and a calibrated risk-fusion policy. To evaluate this setting, we construct SIA-Bench, a benchmark of 3,000 invocation records with group-safe splits, lineage metadata, runtime context, canonical action labels, and derived continuous-risk targets. On a held-out split of indirect prompt injection attacks, calibrated fusion reaches 0.439 high-risk AUPRC, improving over 0.405 for the contextual scorer and 0.380 for the strongest static baseline, while the contextual scorer remains better calibrated with 0.289 expected calibration error. On the locked in-distribution test split, gains are smaller and static priors remain useful. The resulting claim is therefore narrower: request-conditioned auditing is most valuable as an invocation-time risk-scoring and triage layer rather than as a replacement for static screening. Code is available at https://github.com/123zgj123/STARS.