Governance at the Boundary: How Agent Decomposition Degrades Policy Compliance

Existing agent benchmarks ask whether the agent finished the task. We ask whether it finished it within policy. We introduce Fiducia-bench, a benchmark for the governability of financial agents---whether they escalate when obligated, abstain when required, and leave an auditable trail---and use it to study a question no prior benchmark addresses: does decomposing an agent into components degrade its governance? It does, and the mechanism is specific. Policy-relevant facts discovered by one component are attenuated at the handoff boundary before reaching the component that must act on them. In a 626-episode experiment across 100 KYC/AML task variants, two models, and three architectures, a 32B open-weights model attenuated 0% of discovered facts under a single-loop baseline, 56% under a fixed pipeline, and 85% under an orchestrator-subagent architecture (all at constraint distance 2). A stronger model (gpt-4.1-mini) attenuated 3-6% under the same conditions, suggesting the governance cost of decomposition is partly a function of model capability. Critically, the same mechanism produces both under-escalation and over-escalation, depending on whether the dropped fact was a risk signal or an exculpating one. The benchmark, all tasks, and the verification harness are open-source

How to Realize Recursively Self-Improving Agents and Personal Singularity: A Goal-, Scope-, Tool-, and Benchmark-Driven Multi-Agent Architecture

Large language model (LLM) agents can increasingly plan, use tools, maintain memory, and execute long-horizon tasks. These advances motivate two linked questions: how can an agent improve the mechanisms by which it learns and acts, and how can that improvement increase the durable capabilities of its user rather than only the software itself? This paper proposes a governed multi-agent architecture for recursively self-improving agents and introduces personal singularity as a bounded human-AI co-development objective: helping a user approach an expanding, user-defined capability frontier across selected domains. Each agent is defined by a goal contract, bounded scope, validated tool registry, tool-level tests, end-to-end benchmarks, an owner-controlled autonomy policy, a routing policy, memory, and an improvement policy. Out-of-scope tasks are transferred to another accountable agent or to a newly created niche agent. A user-facing Auto-Index selects interactive, hybrid, autonomous, or scheduled operation without overriding external permissions. The architecture combines a fast planner-executor-verifier loop, a slower evidence-gated improvement loop, an external governance plane, decentralized agent lineages, an owner-directed agent foundry, and a Personal Singularity OS coordinating working, computational-imaging, process-learning, and personal-learning agents. We formalize scope, routing, improvement acceptance, bounded goal evolution, tool-first execution, and human capability transfer, and provide safety invariants, benchmark design, and an implementation roadmap. This is a position and systems-design paper, not evidence that unrestricted recursive self-improvement or personal singularity has already been achieved.

Agent Behavior Mining: Generative AI Agent Governance in Business Processes

As organizations increasingly deploy generative AI agents to automate business processes, they face a governance dilemma: although these agents can increase operational flexibility, their non-deterministic nature challenges the control and standardization that Business Process Management seeks to enforce. This paper addresses this \emph{invisible autonomy risk} by introducing \emph{Agent Behavior Mining}, a governance capability that enables the application of process mining techniques to render generative AI agent decision-making observable and traceable. We (1) improve the understanding of generative AI agent behavior through an event data model that translates granular agent activities -- including reasoning traces, tool usage, and token costs -- into standardized process logs; (2) instantiate the data model in a multi-agent order-to-cash implementation, demonstrating how process managers can leverage agent logs to detect policy deviations and quantify operational variability; and (3) evaluate the perceived practical utility of the approach in an exploratory study with 18 industry practitioners. The results indicate that practitioners view behavioral transparency as a prerequisite for trust and consider the ability to examine agent reasoning as an important governance requirement for the next generation of AI-driven business processes.