The Price of Safety: Benign-Case Utility and Token Overhead of Memory-Poisoning Defenses in LLM Agents
Researchers quantify the latency and token overhead that memory-poisoning defences impose on LLM agents even when no attack is present—a practical cost often overlooked in deployment planning.
Summary written by editorial AI · Source link below
arXiv:2609.22818v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Memory-poisoning defenses for LLM agents are typically evaluated by how well they stop attacks, even though almost all traffic they encounter is benign. We measure their cost when no attack is present. Our harness holds the memory backend, retrieval, answer prompt, and judge constant, changing only the defense. We test four defenses on half of LoCoMo: five long conversations with 750 turns and 255 questions per run, repeated three times each.
Editorial Analysis
Deploying defensive layers on LLM agents introduces non-trivial performance costs; understanding the benign-case overhead is essential before committing to production rollouts.
Include overhead benchmarks from this research when evaluating memory-safety mechanisms for your LLM-agent deployments.
Forward-looking interpretation drafted by editorial AI under human review — not a reproduction of the source. See methodology.
External link — opens at arXiv Crypto & Security in a new tab.
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