Bounded Loops: Pre-Run Spend Bounds, Proved Termination, and Verified Completion for Agent Harnesses

arXiv:2609.27871 · cs.SE, cs.AI · Submitted 2026-08-20 · Read on arXiv

cs.SE, cs.AI

Submitted: 2026-08-20

Updated: 2026-08-20

Code: https://github.com/qualixar/bounded-loops

Terminology

• Verification — 24× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• Verifier — 19× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• Provenance — 7× in this paper · explained in 4 episodes
• Accuracy — 6× in this paper · explained in 1 episode
• Agent Harness — 5× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• Benchmark — 5× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• Trace — 5× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• Consistency — 4× in this paper · explained in 3 episodes
• Core — 3× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• Failure Modes — 3× in this paper · explained in 3 episodes
• Scaffolding — 3× in this paper · explained in 3 episodes
• Selection Bias — 3× in this paper · explained in 4 episodes
• Topological Order — 3× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• Actor — 2× in this paper · explained in 3 episodes
• Agentic AI — 2× in this paper · explained in 1 episode
• Calibration — 2× in this paper · explained in 7 episodes
• Formal Methods — 2× in this paper · explained in 3 episodes
• Hallucination — 2× in this paper · explained in 3 episodes
• Abstraction — 1× in this paper · explained in 1 episode
• Action Space — 1× in this paper · explained in 1 episode
• Adam — 1× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• Agent Memory — 1× in this paper · explained in 1 episode
• Empirical Coverage — 1× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• Human-in-the-Loop — 1× in this paper · explained in 3 episodes
• In International Conference on Learning Representations — 1× in this paper
• Introspection — 1× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• Iterative Refinement — 1× in this paper · explained in 3 episodes
• Multi-Agent System — 1× in this paper · explained in 6 episodes
• Multi-agent Collaborative Framework — 1× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• Reinforcement Learning — 1× in this paper · explained in 4 episodes

Sources

• Agent Behavioral Contracts II: Certifying Compositional Reliability Without Assuming Independence
• AgentScope: A Flexible yet Robust Multi-Agent Platform
• Large Language Model based Multi-Agents: A Survey of Progress and Challenges
• From Agent Loops to Structured Graphs:A Scheduler-Theoretic Framework for LLM Agent Execution

Related papers

• Falsification-Based Verification of LLM-Generated Optimization Models: Sound Test Batteries and Their Detection Limits
• GitSkills: A Dataset of Agent Skills on GitHub
• SABER: Benchmarking Operational Safety of LLM Coding Agents in Stateful Project Workspaces
• PackMonitor: Enabling Zero Package Hallucinations Through Decoding-Time Monitoring
• IntentCoding: Amplifying User Intent in Code Generation
• Incentives and Outcomes in Bug Bounties