arXiv subjects

Charlie Summers

Publications and source records attributed to Charlie Summers.

4 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

Agentic Data Environments

Autonomous agents promise substantial gains in speed, scale, and labor efficiency, but their failures can impose abrupt and often irreversible costs. The central challenge for agentic automation is therefore to increase the benefits of automation while bounding the consequences of failure. While databases remain central to modern computing, agents operate over a broader data environment spanning files, APIs, applications, and system state. In this talk, I will outline early work on Agentic Data Environments -- the execution substrate in which agents operate -- that both amplify agent capabilities and enforce safety guarantees. This perspective reframes data systems from passive stores of state into active substrates for safe, reliable execution.

cs.AI↗

arXiv2026

Data Flow Control: Data Safety Policies for AI Agents

Agents increasingly generate SQL, orchestrate pipelines, and automate data analysis on behalf of users. While recent work improves query correctness, correctness is not safety. A query may be semantically valid yet violate regulatory, privacy, or business constraints that govern how data may be combined and released. We argue that enforcing such constraints is fundamentally a data infrastructure problem. This paper introduces Data Flow Control (DFC), a framework to declaratively specify and guarantee policy enforcement over tuple-level data flows within a DBMS query. A key challenge is defining a policy language that is optimizer-invariant yet efficient to enforce at scale. We formalize data safety as aggregate predicates over provenance monomials and present Passant, a portable query rewriting layer that enforces DFC policies without materializing provenance. Across five DBMS engines -- DuckDB, Umbra, PostgreSQL, DataFusion, and SQLServer -- Passant achieves ~0% overhead and outperforms alternatives by orders of magnitude. As a result, Data Flow Control is the first step towards moving data safety from prompts and post-hoc checks into the data infrastructure. Data Flow Control is available open source at https://github.com/dataflowcontrol/data-flow-control.

cs.DB↗

arXiv2025

Please Don't Kill My Vibe: Empowering Agents with Data Flow Control

The promise of Large Language Model (LLM) agents is to perform complex, stateful tasks. This promise is stunted by significant risks - policy violations, process corruption, and security flaws - that stem from the lack of visibility and mechanisms to manage undesirable data flows produced by agent actions. Today, agent workflows are responsible for enforcing these policies in ad hoc ways. Just as data validation and access controls shifted from the application to the DBMS, freeing application developers from these concerns, we argue that systems should support Data Flow Controls (DFCs) and enforce DFC policies natively. This paper describes early work developing a portable instance of DFC for DBMSes and outlines a broader research agenda toward DFC for agent ecosystems.

cs.CR↗

arXiv2022

Watts: Infrastructure for Open-Ended Learning

This paper proposes a framework called Watts for implementing, comparing, and recombining open-ended learning (OEL) algorithms. Motivated by modularity and algorithmic flexibility, Watts atomizes the components of OEL systems to promote the study of and direct comparisons between approaches. Examining implementations of three OEL algorithms, the paper introduces the modules of the framework. The hope is for Watts to enable benchmarking and to explore new types of OEL algorithms. The repo is available at \url{https://github.com/aadharna/watts}

cs.AI↗