Facts Without Rules: Boundary Metadata Collapse in Multi-Agent LLM Handoffs

Abstract

Multi-agent LLM systems often coordinate by compressing an upstream interaction into a handoff artifact that downstream agents treat as shared state. We show that this handoff step is a structural source of privacy leakage: summaries preferentially preserve operational facts while weakening the boundary metadata that governs how those facts may be used---a failure mode we call \emph{summary collapse}. On a controlled multi-agent coordination testbed we measure marker survival with a human-valida

Categories

Framework mappings

Suggested from the entry's categories.

@misc{wang2026facts,
  title = {{Facts Without Rules: Boundary Metadata Collapse in Multi-Agent LLM Handoffs}},
  author = {Yian Wang and Agam Goyal and Eshwar Chandrasekharan and Hari Sundaram},
  year = {2026},
  month = aug,
  eprint = {2608.29028},
  archivePrefix = {arXiv},
  url = {https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/6dd494eead5b8fdb8340c33b0a3a4deef955323f}
}