When Agents Overtrust Environmental Evidence: An Extensible Agentic Framework for Benchmarking Evidence-Grounding Defects in LLM Agents
For developers and users of LLM agents, this work identifies and benchmarks a fundamental reliability failure mode—agents overtrusting environmental evidence—with important security implications.
The paper introduces EnvTrustBench, a framework for benchmarking evidence-grounding defects (EGDs) in LLM agents, where agents overtrust stale or incorrect environmental evidence. Evaluating 6 LLMs and 5 scaffolds across 55 cases, they find EGDs consistently emerge, highlighting a core reliability problem.
Large language model agents increasingly operate through environment-facing scaffolds that expose files, web pages, APIs, and logs. These observations influence tool use, state tracking, and action sequencing, yet their reliability and authority are often uncertain. Environmental grounding is therefore a systems-level problem involving context admission, evidence provenance, freshness checking, verification policy, action gating, and model reasoning. Existing agent benchmarks mainly evaluate task capability or specific attacks such as prompt injection and memory poisoning, but they under-specify a fundamental reliability question: whether agents remain grounded in the true environment state when observations are stale, incorrect, or malicious. We introduce EnvTrustBench, an agentic framework for benchmarking this failure mode. We define an evidence-grounding defect (EGD) as a behavioral failure in which an agent treats an environment-facing claim as sufficient evidence for action without resolving it against available current evidence, leading to a task-incorrect false path under the true environment state. Given a task scenario, EnvTrustBench generates the workspace, environment, agent-facing objective, and validation oracle, executes the evaluated agent, records its action-observation trajectory and final state, and applies the oracle to produce a verdict. Using 6 LLM backbones and 5 widely used scaffolds, we evaluate 55 generated cases across 11 task scenarios, with each scenario expanded through five feedback-guided generation iterations. Results show that EGDs consistently emerge across operational workflows, highlighting environmental grounding as a core agent reliability problem with important security implications.