arXiv subjects

Xueping Liang

Publications and source records attributed to Xueping Liang.

16 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

Towards an Agent-First Web: Redesigning the Web for AI Agents

The World Wide Web was built on an assumption held for three decades: the primary consumer of web content is a human being. This permeates every layer; its access model presumes human visitors, its economics rest on human attention, and its content targets human perception. The rapid emergence of AI agents as intermediaries between humans and web content invalidates this assumption. Yet the web resists agents through blanket blocking, CAPTCHA-based exclusion, and economic models that treat agent access as extraction rather than legitimate interaction. This paper proposes a principled redesign across three layers. At the access layer, agents acting for humans should inherit equivalent access rights, governed by rate limiting and agent identification metadata in HTTP requests, analogous to browser headers, alongside a dual-layer architecture serving human-readable and agent-optimized content from the same domain. At the economic layer, we propose an intent-based tier framework grounded in the agent-as-human-proxy principle: an agent's economic obligation mirrors that of the human it represents. A token-based subscription model meters content in tokens rather than pageviews, alongside a commissioned content economy anchoring AI content production in human intentionality. At the content layer, we identify epistemic recursion, the self-referential loop in which AI-generated content is consumed by agents to produce further content, progressively detaching web knowledge from human ground truth. We propose the Agent Text Markup Language (ATML), a four-level human supervision tier model, and a cryptographic provenance chain to counter this threat. Together these constitute ten design principles for an agent-first internet, one in which agents are first-class citizens whose integration requires renegotiating the web's foundational social contract across access, economics, and content.

cs.AI↗

arXiv2026

Think Before You Act -- A Neurocognitive Governance Model for Autonomous AI Agents

The rapid deployment of autonomous AI agents across enterprise, healthcare, and safety-critical environments has created a fundamental governance gap. Existing approaches, runtime guardrails, training-time alignment, and post-hoc auditing treat governance as an external constraint rather than an internalized behavioral principle, leaving agents vulnerable to unsafe and irreversible actions. We address this gap by drawing on how humans self-govern naturally: before acting, humans engage deliberate cognitive processes grounded in executive function, inhibitory control, and internalized organizational rules to evaluate whether an intended action is permissible, requires modification, or demands escalation. This paper proposes a neurocognitive governance framework that formally maps this human self-governance process to LLM-driven agent reasoning, establishing a structural parallel between the human brain and the large language model as the cognitive core of an agent. We formalize a Pre-Action Governance Reasoning Loop (PAGRL) in which agents consult a four-layer governance rule set: global, workflow-specific, agent-specific, and situational before every consequential action, mirroring how human organizations structure compliance hierarchies across enterprise, department, and role levels. Implemented on a production-grade retail supply chain workflow, the framework achieves 95% compliance accuracy and zero false escalations to human oversight, demonstrating that embedding governance into agent reasoning produces more consistent, explainable, and auditable compliance than external enforcement. This work offers a principled foundation for autonomous AI agents that govern themselves the way humans do: not because rules are imposed upon them, but because deliberation is embedded in how they think.

cs.AI↗

arXiv2026

Toward Zero-Egress Psychiatric AI: On-Device LLM Deployment for Privacy-Preserving Mental Health Decision Support

Privacy represents one of the most critical yet underaddressed barriers to AI adoption in mental healthcare -- particularly in high-sensitivity operational environments such as military, correctional, and remote healthcare settings, where the risk of patient data exposure can deter help-seeking behavior entirely. Existing AI-enabled psychiatric decision support systems predominantly rely on cloud-based inference pipelines, requiring sensitive patient data to leave the device and traverse external servers, creating unacceptable privacy and security risks in these contexts. In this paper, we propose a zero-egress, on-device AI platform for privacy-preserving psychiatric decision support, deployed as a cross-platform mobile application. The proposed system extends our prior work on fine-tuned LLM consortiums for psychiatric diagnosis standardization by fundamentally re-architecting the inference pipeline for fully local execution -- ensuring that no patient data is transmitted to, processed by, or stored on any external server at any stage. The platform integrates a consortium of three lightweight, fine-tuned, and quantized open-source LLMs -- Gemma, Phi-3.5-mini, and Qwen2 -- selected for their compact architectures and proven efficiency on resource-constrained mobile hardware. An on-device orchestration layer coordinates ensemble inference and consensus-based diagnostic reasoning, producing DSM-5-aligned assessments for conditions. The platform is designed to assist clinicians with differential diagnosis and evidence-linked symptom mapping, as well as to support patient-facing self-screening with appropriate clinical safeguards. Initial evaluation demonstrates that the proposed zero-egress deployment achieves diagnostic accuracy comparable to its server-side predecessor while sustaining real-time inference latency on commodity mobile hardware.

cs.AI↗

arXiv2026

Flowr -- Scaling Up Retail Supply Chain Operations Through Agentic AI in Large Scale Supermarket Chains

Retail supply chain operations in supermarket chains involve continuous, high-volume manual workflows spanning demand forecasting, procurement, supplier coordination, and inventory replenishment, processes that are repetitive, decision-intensive, and difficult to scale without significant human effort. Despite growing investment in data analytics, the decision-making and coordination layers of these workflows remain predominantly manual, reactive, and fragmented across outlets, distribution centers, and supplier networks. This paper introduces Flowr, a novel agentic AI framework for automating end-to-end retail supply chain workflows in large-scale supermarket operations. Flowr systematically decomposes manual supply chain operations into specialized AI agents, each responsible for a clearly defined cognitive role, enabling automation of processes previously dependent on continuous human coordination. To ensure task accuracy and adherence to responsible AI principles, the framework employs a consortium of fine-tuned, domain-specialized large language models coordinated by a central reasoning LLM. Central to the framework is a human-in-the-loop orchestration model in which supply chain managers supervise and intervene across workflow stages via a Model Context Protocol (MCP)-enabled interface, preserving accountability and organizational control. Evaluation demonstrates that Flowr significantly reduces manual coordination overhead, improves demand-supply alignment, and enables proactive exception handling at a scale unachievable through manual processes. The framework was validated in collaboration with a large-scale supermarket chain and is domain-independent, offering a generalizable blueprint for agentic AI-driven supply chain automation across large-scale enterprise settings.

cs.AI↗

arXiv2026

AI Trust OS -- A Continuous Governance Framework for Autonomous AI Observability and Zero-Trust Compliance in Enterprise Environments

The accelerating adoption of large language models, retrieval-augmented generation pipelines, and multi-agent AI workflows has created a structural governance crisis. Organizations cannot govern what they cannot see, and existing compliance methodologies built for deterministic web applications provide no mechanism for discovering or continuously validating AI systems that emerge across engineering teams without formal oversight. The result is a widening trust gap between what regulators demand as proof of AI governance maturity and what organizations can demonstrate. This paper proposes AI Trust OS, a governance architecture for continuous, autonomous AI observability and zero-trust compliance. AI Trust OS reconceptualizes compliance as an always-on, telemetry-driven operating layer in which AI systems are discovered through observability signals, control assertions are collected by automated probes, and trust artifacts are synthesized continuously. The framework rests on four principles: proactive discovery, telemetry evidence over manual attestation, continuous posture over point-in-time audit, and architecture-backed proof over policy-document trust. The framework operates through a zero-trust telemetry boundary in which ephemeral read-only probes validate structural metadata without ingressing source code or payload-level PII. An AI Observability Extractor Agent scans LangSmith and Datadog LLM telemetry, automatically registering undocumented AI systems and shifting governance from organizational self-report to empirical machine observation. Evaluated across ISO 42001, the EU AI Act, SOC 2, GDPR, and HIPAA, the paper argues that telemetry-first AI governance represents a categorical architectural shift in how enterprise trust is produced and demonstrated.

cs.AI↗

arXiv2026

Train the Trainers -- An Agentic AI Framework for Peer-Based Mental Health Support in Battlefield Environments

Modern military operations expose soldiers to sustained psychological stress, leading to acute reactions, post-traumatic stress symptoms, and other mental health issues. Although the U.S. Department of Defense offers evidence-based therapies, access to trained professionals in forward-deployed and contested environments is limited. As a result, soldiers with early-stage distress are often evacuated to rear medical facilities, delaying care, reducing readiness, and increasing long-term risks. This paper proposes a Train-the-Trainers framework in which soldiers who have completed therapy and returned to duty are trained as peer facilitators to provide first-line psychological support in operational settings. To scale and standardize this model under severe resource and connectivity constraints, we introduce an agentic AI-enabled platform that augments these recovered soldiers with specialized AI agents. The recovered soldier acts as a human supervisor, coordinating agents for symptom triage, guided peer-support interventions, operational constraint reasoning, training and simulation, and structured documentation for clinical escalation when needed. The AI agents use consensus-driven decision support in high-stakes environments. The architecture functions in air-gapped and low-connectivity settings, maintaining human oversight and ethical safeguards. A functional prototype was developed with the McDonald U.S. Army Health Center, Newport News, VA, USA. By combining peer-based intervention with consensus-driven agentic AI decision support, the framework seeks to cut response times, prevent symptom escalation, reduce unnecessary evacuations, and improve continuity of care. This work shows how agentic AI can serve as a force multiplier for mental health support in austere environments and identifies pathways for broader evaluation and deployment across defense and humanitarian operations.

cs.HC↗

arXiv2026

A Practical Guide to Agentic AI Transition in Organizations

Agentic AI represents a significant shift in how intelligence is applied within organizations, moving beyond AI-assisted tools toward autonomous systems capable of reasoning, decision-making, and coordinated action across workflows. As these systems mature, they have the potential to automate a substantial share of manual organizational processes, fundamentally reshaping how work is designed, executed, and governed. Although many organizations have adopted AI to improve productivity, most implementations remain limited to isolated use cases and human-centered, tool-driven workflows. Despite increasing awareness of agentic AI's strategic importance, engineering teams and organizational leaders often lack clear guidance on how to operationalize it effectively. Key challenges include an overreliance on traditional software engineering practices, limited integration of business-domain knowledge, unclear ownership of AI-driven workflows, and the absence of sustainable human-AI collaboration models. Consequently, organizations struggle to move beyond experimentation, scale agentic systems, and align them with tangible business value. Drawing on practical experience in designing and deploying agentic AI workflows across multiple organizations and business domains, this paper proposes a pragmatic framework for transitioning organizational functions from manual processes to automated agentic AI systems. The framework emphasizes domain-driven use case identification, systematic delegation of tasks to AI agents, AI-assisted construction of agentic workflows, and small, AI-augmented teams working closely with business stakeholders. Central to the approach is a human-in-the-loop operating model in which individuals act as orchestrators of multiple AI agents, enabling scalable automation while maintaining oversight, adaptability, and organizational control.

cs.CY↗

arXiv2026

An Agentic AI Control Plane for 6G Network Slice Orchestration, Monitoring, and Trading

6G networks are expected to be AI-native, intent-driven, and economically programmable, requiring fundamentally new approaches to network slice orchestration. Existing slicing frameworks, largely designed for 5G, rely on static policies and manual workflows and are ill-suited for the dynamic, multi-domain, and service-centric nature of emerging 6G environments. In this paper, we propose an agentic AI control plane architecture for 6G network slice orchestration, monitoring, and trading that treats orchestration as a holistic control function encompassing slice planning, deployment, continuous monitoring, and economically informed decision-making. The proposed control plane is realized as a layered architecture in which multiple cooperating AI agents. To support flexible and on-demand slice utilization, the control plane incorporates market-aware orchestration capabilities, allowing slice requirements, pricing, and availability to be jointly considered during orchestration decisions. A natural language interface, implemented using the Model Context Protocol (MCP), enables users and applications to interact with control-plane functions through intent-based queries while enforcing safety and policy constraints. To ensure responsible and explainable autonomy, the control plane integrates fine-tuned large language models organized as a multi-model consortium, governed by a dedicated reasoning model. The proposed approach is evaluated using a real-world testbed with multiple mobile core instances (e.g Open5GS) integrated with Ericsson's RAN infrastructure. The results demonstrate that combining agentic autonomy, closed-loop SLA assurance, market-aware orchestration, and natural language control enables a scalable and adaptive 6G-native control plane for network slice management, highlighting the potential of agentic AI as a foundational mechanism for future 6G networks.

cs.NI↗

arXiv2025

Towards Responsible and Explainable AI Agents with Consensus-Driven Reasoning

Agentic AI represents a major shift in how autonomous systems reason, plan, and execute multi-step tasks through the coordination of Large Language Models (LLMs), Vision Language Models (VLMs), tools, and external services. While these systems enable powerful new capabilities, increasing autonomy introduces critical challenges related to explainability, accountability, robustness, and governance, especially when agent outputs influence downstream actions or decisions. Existing agentic AI implementations often emphasize functionality and scalability, yet provide limited mechanisms for understanding decision rationale or enforcing responsibility across agent interactions. This paper presents a Responsible(RAI) and Explainable(XAI) AI Agent Architecture for production-grade agentic workflows based on multi-model consensus and reasoning-layer governance. In the proposed design, a consortium of heterogeneous LLM and VLM agents independently generates candidate outputs from a shared input context, explicitly exposing uncertainty, disagreement, and alternative interpretations. A dedicated reasoning agent then performs structured consolidation across these outputs, enforcing safety and policy constraints, mitigating hallucinations and bias, and producing auditable, evidence-backed decisions. Explainability is achieved through explicit cross-model comparison and preserved intermediate outputs, while responsibility is enforced through centralized reasoning-layer control and agent-level constraints. We evaluate the architecture across multiple real-world agentic AI workflows, demonstrating that consensus-driven reasoning improves robustness, transparency, and operational trust across diverse application domains. This work provides practical guidance for designing agentic AI systems that are autonomous and scalable, yet responsible and explainable by construction.

cs.AI↗

arXiv2025

A Practical Guide for Designing, Developing, and Deploying Production-Grade Agentic AI Workflows

Agentic AI marks a major shift in how autonomous systems reason, plan, and execute multi-step tasks. Unlike traditional single model prompting, agentic workflows integrate multiple specialized agents with different Large Language Models(LLMs), tool-augmented capabilities, orchestration logic, and external system interactions to form dynamic pipelines capable of autonomous decision-making and action. As adoption accelerates across industry and research, organizations face a central challenge: how to design, engineer, and operate production-grade agentic AI workflows that are reliable, observable, maintainable, and aligned with safety and governance requirements. This paper provides a practical, end-to-end guide for designing, developing, and deploying production-quality agentic AI systems. We introduce a structured engineering lifecycle encompassing workflow decomposition, multi-agent design patterns, Model Context Protocol(MCP), and tool integration, deterministic orchestration, Responsible-AI considerations, and environment-aware deployment strategies. We then present nine core best practices for engineering production-grade agentic AI workflows, including tool-first design over MCP, pure-function invocation, single-tool and single-responsibility agents, externalized prompt management, Responsible-AI-aligned model-consortium design, clean separation between workflow logic and MCP servers, containerized deployment for scalable operations, and adherence to the Keep it Simple, Stupid (KISS) principle to maintain simplicity and robustness. To demonstrate these principles in practice, we present a comprehensive case study: a multimodal news-analysis and media-generation workflow. By combining architectural guidance, operational patterns, and practical implementation insights, this paper offers a foundational reference to build robust, extensible, and production-ready agentic AI workflows.

cs.AI↗

arXiv2025

ASTRIDE: A Security Threat Modeling Platform for Agentic-AI Applications

AI agent-based systems are becoming increasingly integral to modern software architectures, enabling autonomous decision-making, dynamic task execution, and multimodal interactions through large language models (LLMs). However, these systems introduce novel and evolving security challenges, including prompt injection attacks, context poisoning, model manipulation, and opaque agent-to-agent communication, that are not effectively captured by traditional threat modeling frameworks. In this paper, we introduce ASTRIDE, an automated threat modeling platform purpose-built for AI agent-based systems. ASTRIDE extends the classical STRIDE framework by introducing a new threat category, A for AI Agent-Specific Attacks, which encompasses emerging vulnerabilities such as prompt injection, unsafe tool invocation, and reasoning subversion, unique to agent-based applications. To automate threat modeling, ASTRIDE combines a consortium of fine-tuned vision-language models (VLMs) with the OpenAI-gpt-oss reasoning LLM to perform end-to-end analysis directly from visual agent architecture diagrams, such as data flow diagrams(DFDs). LLM agents orchestrate the end-to-end threat modeling automation process by coordinating interactions between the VLM consortium and the reasoning LLM. Our evaluations demonstrate that ASTRIDE provides accurate, scalable, and explainable threat modeling for next-generation intelligent systems. To the best of our knowledge, ASTRIDE is the first framework to both extend STRIDE with AI-specific threats and integrate fine-tuned VLMs with a reasoning LLM to fully automate diagram-driven threat modeling in AI agent-based applications.

cs.AI↗

arXiv2025

SRE-Llama -- Fine-Tuned Meta's Llama LLM, Federated Learning, Blockchain and NFT Enabled Site Reliability Engineering(SRE) Platform for Communication and Networking Software Services

Software services are crucial for reliable communication and networking; therefore, Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) is important to ensure these systems stay reliable and perform well in cloud-native environments. SRE leverages tools like Prometheus and Grafana to monitor system metrics, defining critical Service Level Indicators (SLIs) and Service Level Objectives (SLOs) for maintaining high service standards. However, a significant challenge arises as many developers often lack in-depth understanding of these tools and the intricacies involved in defining appropriate SLIs and SLOs. To bridge this gap, we propose a novel SRE platform, called SRE-Llama, enhanced by Generative-AI, Federated Learning, Blockchain, and Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs). This platform aims to automate and simplify the process of monitoring, SLI/SLO generation, and alert management, offering ease in accessibility and efficy for developers. The system operates by capturing metrics from cloud-native services and storing them in a time-series database, like Prometheus and Mimir. Utilizing this stored data, our platform employs Federated Learning models to identify the most relevant and impactful SLI metrics for different services and SLOs, addressing concerns around data privacy. Subsequently, fine-tuned Meta's Llama-3 LLM is adopted to intelligently generate SLIs, SLOs, error budgets, and associated alerting mechanisms based on these identified SLI metrics. A unique aspect of our platform is the encoding of generated SLIs and SLOs as NFT objects, which are then stored on a Blockchain. This feature provides immutable record-keeping and facilitates easy verification and auditing of the SRE metrics and objectives. The automation of the proposed platform is governed by the blockchain smart contracts. The proposed SRE-Llama platform prototype has been implemented with a use case featuring a customized Open5GS 5G Core.

cs.NI↗

arXiv2025

Agentsway -- Software Development Methodology for AI Agents-based Teams

The emergence of Agentic AI is fundamentally transforming how software is designed, developed, and maintained. Traditional software development methodologies such as Agile, Kanban, ShapeUp, etc, were originally designed for human-centric teams and are increasingly inadequate in environments where autonomous AI agents contribute to planning, coding, testing, and continuous learning. To address this methodological gap, we present "Agentsway" a novel software development framework designed for ecosystems where AI agents operate as first-class collaborators. Agentsway introduces a structured lifecycle centered on human orchestration, and privacy-preserving collaboration among specialized AI agents. The framework defines distinct roles for planning, prompting, coding, testing, and fine-tuning agents, each contributing to iterative improvement and adaptive learning throughout the development process. By integrating fine-tuned LLMs that leverage outputs and feedback from different agents throughout the development cycle as part of a retrospective learning process, Agentsway enhances domain-specific reasoning, and explainable decision-making across the entire software development lifecycle. Responsible AI principles are further embedded across the agents through the coordinated use of multiple fine-tuned LLMs and advanced reasoning models, ensuring balanced, transparent, and accountable decision-making. This work advances software engineering by formalizing agent-centric collaboration, integrating privacy-by-design principles, and defining measurable metrics for productivity and trust. Agentsway represents a foundational step toward the next generation of AI-native, self-improving software development methodologies. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first research effort to introduce a dedicated methodology explicitly designed for AI agent-based software engineering teams.

cs.SE↗

arXiv2025

Model Context Contracts - MCP-Enabled Framework to Integrate LLMs With Blockchain Smart Contracts

In recent years, blockchain has experienced widespread adoption across various industries, becoming integral to numerous enterprise applications. Concurrently, the rise of generative AI and LLMs has transformed human-computer interactions, offering advanced capabilities in understanding and generating human-like text. The introduction of the MCP has further enhanced AI integration by standardizing communication between AI systems and external data sources. Despite these advancements, there is still no standardized method for seamlessly integrating LLM applications and blockchain. To address this concern, we propose "MCC: Model Context Contracts" a novel framework that enables LLMs to interact directly with blockchain smart contracts through MCP-like protocol. This integration allows AI agents to invoke blockchain smart contracts, facilitating more dynamic and context-aware interactions between users and blockchain networks. Essentially, it empowers users to interact with blockchain systems and perform transactions using queries in natural language. Within this proposed architecture, blockchain smart contracts can function as intelligent agents capable of recognizing user input in natural language and executing the corresponding transactions. To ensure that the LLM accurately interprets natural language inputs and maps them to the appropriate MCP functions, the LLM was fine-tuned using a custom dataset comprising user inputs paired with their corresponding MCP server functions. This fine-tuning process significantly improved the platform's performance and accuracy. To validate the effectiveness of MCC, we have developed an end-to-end prototype implemented on the Rahasak blockchain with the fine-tuned Llama-4 LLM. To the best of our knowledge, this research represents the first approach to using the concept of Model Context Protocol to integrate LLMs with blockchain.

cs.CR↗

arXiv2025

EGNInfoLeaker: Unveiling the Risks of Public Key Reuse and User Identity Leakage in Blockchain

While Ethereum's discovery protocols (Discv4/ Discv5) incorporate robust cryptographic designs to protect user privacy, real-world deployment reveals critical vulnerabilities when users deviate from security guidelines. In this paper, we design a system called EGNInfoLeaker. Our study is the first work that uncovers widespread public key reuse across Ethereum's peer-to-peer networks - a practice that fundamentally undermines the protocol's privacy guarantees. Through systematic analysis of 300 real-world network snapshots, we identify 83 users controlling 483 service nodes via public key reuse, enabling precise de-anonymization through IP correlation. Using evidence collected by EGNInfoLeaker, our Graph-Based Identity Association Algorithm links users to network entities and generates comprehensive user profiles. For User27, it exposes the public key, IP, network ID, location (country/region/city), and ISP/ORG details. The EGNInfoLeaker system demonstrates how such cryptographic misuse transforms theoretical anonymity into practical identity leakage, exposing users to surveillance and targeted attacks. These findings establish that protocol security depends not only on sound design but also on strict user compliance. Going forward, our detection framework provides a foundation for enhancing real-world privacy preservation in decentralized networks.

cs.CR↗

arXiv2021

Vulnerability Characterization and Privacy Quantification for Cyber-Physical Systems

Cyber-physical systems (CPS) data privacy protection during sharing, aggregating, and publishing is a challenging problem. Several privacy protection mechanisms have been developed in the literature to protect sensitive data from adversarial analysis and eliminate the risk of re-identifying the original properties of shared data. However, most of the existing solutions have drawbacks, such as (i) lack of a proper vulnerability characterization model to accurately identify where privacy is needed, (ii) ignoring data providers privacy preference, (iii) using uniform privacy protection which may create inadequate privacy for some provider while overprotecting others, and (iv) lack of a comprehensive privacy quantification model assuring data privacy-preservation. To address these issues, we propose a personalized privacy preference framework by characterizing and quantifying the CPS vulnerabilities as well as ensuring privacy. First, we introduce a Standard Vulnerability Profiling Library (SVPL) by arranging the nodes of an energy-CPS from maximum to minimum vulnerable based on their privacy loss. Based on this model, we present our personalized privacy framework (PDP) in which Laplace noise is added based on the individual node's selected privacy preferences. Finally, combining these two proposed methods, we demonstrate that our privacy characterization and quantification model can attain better privacy preservation by eliminating the trade-off between privacy, utility, and risk of losing information.

cs.CR↗