RedAct: Redacting Agent Capability Traces for Procedural Skill Protection

Hugging Face Daily Papers Papers

Summary

Introduces RedAct, a framework to protect agent traces from procedural skill leakage by selectively redacting sensitive details while preserving audit evidence, along with CapTraceBench for evaluation.

Users rely on execution traces to observe agent behavior, diagnose failures, and ensure accountability. These traces contain rich procedural detail, including tool invocations, intermediate decisions, and error-recovery logic. Yet this detail can expose private procedural skills, allowing downstream methods to recover key formulas, thresholds, and strategies without access to model weights or skill files. To quantify this risk and evaluate protection, we construct CapTraceBench, a benchmark of 75 specialized long-horizon tasks and 154 curated skills across seven domains. We also introduce RedAct https://github.com/XuShuwenn/RedAct, a protected trace release framework that localizes protected key information, rewrites traces while preserving verifier-critical evidence, and embeds behavioral watermarks for downstream provenance analysis. Across representative trace reuse methods, RedAct reduces normalized skill transfer (NST) from 44.7--67.1\% on raw traces to below the no-skill baseline, while preserving audit evidence. Its standalone behavioral watermarks reach 93.6--100.0\% true detection with a false alarm rate of at most 1.9\%. These results frame public agent traces as security interfaces and show that selective redaction can reduce procedural capability leakage without removing audit evidence.
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Paper page - RedAct: Redacting Agent Capability Traces for Procedural Skill Protection

Source: https://huggingface.co/papers/2606.10813 πŸ›‘οΈRedAct: Protecting agent traces from procedural skill leakage

What if the traces released for transparency and debugging also become tutorials for copying an agent’s private skills? πŸ‘€

Agent traces can reveal formulas, thresholds, tool choices, validation routines, and recovery strategies β€” enough for downstream agents to reconstruct reusable procedures.

To study this risk, we introduceCapTraceBench:

🧩75long-horizon tasks πŸ› οΈ154curated skills 🌍7professional domains πŸ€– Multiple agent backends and trace-reuse attacks

We then proposeRedAct, a protected trace-release framework that:

πŸ” locates sensitive procedural details ✍️ selectively rewrites them βœ… preserves audit-critical evidence 🧬 embeds behavioral watermarks for provenance

Across multiple reuse settings, raw traces yield44.7–67.1% normalized skill transfer. RedAct pushes itbelow the no-skill baseline, while preserving91.0–96.6% of audit evidence.

Its standalone watermarks further achieve93.6–100.0% detectionwith at most1.9% false alarms. πŸš€

Agent traces are not just logs β€” they are security interfaces.

🌐 Project:https://xushuwenn.github.io/RedAct_Website/ πŸ’» Code:https://github.com/XuShuwenn/RedAct πŸ“„ Paper:https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.10813

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