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Hauptverfasser: Chen, Zixuan, Chen, Jiaxiang, Luo, Li, Xu, Ke, Huang, Xiaoxiang, Sun, Tanfeng, Jiang, Xinghao
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2026
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Online-Zugang:https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.24659
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author Chen, Zixuan
Chen, Jiaxiang
Luo, Li
Xu, Ke
Huang, Xiaoxiang
Sun, Tanfeng
Jiang, Xinghao
author_facet Chen, Zixuan
Chen, Jiaxiang
Luo, Li
Xu, Ke
Huang, Xiaoxiang
Sun, Tanfeng
Jiang, Xinghao
contents LLM-based agents are increasingly deployed for complex tasks requiring planning, tool use, and interaction with external services. Their reliance on untrusted external content exposes them to indirect prompt injection (IPI), in which adversarial instructions embedded in retrieved data hijack agent behavior. Existing attacks rely on static payloads that cannot adapt to agent-specific defenses; even recent adaptive methods lack structured feedback to guide optimization. We introduce \oursys, a feedback-guided iterative framework that closes the loop between injection, diagnosis, and refinement: a rule-based diagnoser produces structured outcome labels with behavioral descriptions, and an LLM-based optimizer refines payloads conditioned on the full optimization history. A synthesis step generates new disguise seeds from failure patterns, enabling the strategy space to self-evolve. On AgentDojo and InjectAgent, \oursys substantially outperforms static baselines and existing adaptive methods across four victim models. Extension experiments on Claude Code, a production-grade coding agent with layered defenses, show that optimized payloads achieve full success on 5 of 9 targets; even those that resist full exploitation exhibit measurable improvement from iterative refinement. We further present a mechanistic analysis of IPI, identifying an attention-mediated threshold mechanism in mid-to-late layers; three causal interventions validate this finding and point to concrete defense directions.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2605_24659
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle IterInject: Indirect Prompt Injection Against LLM Agents via Feedback-Guided Iterative Optimization
Chen, Zixuan
Chen, Jiaxiang
Luo, Li
Xu, Ke
Huang, Xiaoxiang
Sun, Tanfeng
Jiang, Xinghao
Machine Learning
LLM-based agents are increasingly deployed for complex tasks requiring planning, tool use, and interaction with external services. Their reliance on untrusted external content exposes them to indirect prompt injection (IPI), in which adversarial instructions embedded in retrieved data hijack agent behavior. Existing attacks rely on static payloads that cannot adapt to agent-specific defenses; even recent adaptive methods lack structured feedback to guide optimization. We introduce \oursys, a feedback-guided iterative framework that closes the loop between injection, diagnosis, and refinement: a rule-based diagnoser produces structured outcome labels with behavioral descriptions, and an LLM-based optimizer refines payloads conditioned on the full optimization history. A synthesis step generates new disguise seeds from failure patterns, enabling the strategy space to self-evolve. On AgentDojo and InjectAgent, \oursys substantially outperforms static baselines and existing adaptive methods across four victim models. Extension experiments on Claude Code, a production-grade coding agent with layered defenses, show that optimized payloads achieve full success on 5 of 9 targets; even those that resist full exploitation exhibit measurable improvement from iterative refinement. We further present a mechanistic analysis of IPI, identifying an attention-mediated threshold mechanism in mid-to-late layers; three causal interventions validate this finding and point to concrete defense directions.
title IterInject: Indirect Prompt Injection Against LLM Agents via Feedback-Guided Iterative Optimization
topic Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.24659