HALO: Heterogeneous Admission through Localized Obligations for Safe Agentic Execution

2026-07-29

AI Summary

This work addresses the inefficiencies and dependency violations caused by traditional all-or-nothing strategies when heterogeneous response components partially fail under changing conditions in dynamic environments. To mitigate resource waste and maintain system coherence, the paper introduces a novel runtime protocol featuring a localized obligation mechanism. This mechanism leverages declarative precondition validation, component-level support status tracking, and pre-scheduling action re-evaluation to preserve functional components at fine granularity while substituting only blocked actions with fresh candidates—all without compromising dependency consistency. Empirical evaluation demonstrates that the protocol satisfies all 96 admission criteria across 20 test cases, successfully retains all 248 valid components in structured replays (compared to zero for the baseline), and accurately intercepts expired trajectories and achieves recovery in PX4/Gazebo experiments.

Abstract

Recent agentic AI systems may return a heterogeneous response containing notices, requests, handoffs, and actions. Conditions can change before external use, so components from the same response need not remain supported together. Rejecting the whole response discards useful components, whereas checking components independently can leave a dependent without its prerequisite. We present Heterogeneous Admission with Localized Obligations (HALO), a runtime protocol that preserves supported components whose declared prerequisites also remain supported, rechecks each exact action before dispatch, and allows blocked actions to be replaced only by fresh candidates. HALO matched all 96 admission expectations and passed all 20 protocol tests. In structured-response replay, it retained 248/248 supported components, including 128/128 unaffected by unrelated changes, while a whole-response policy retained 0/248. Across ten cold-start PX4/Gazebo sessions, HALO blocked every tested stale route, observed no matching stale setpoint, and completed all fresh recoveries.

Problem

• heterogeneous response
• agentic AI
• component dependency
• runtime admission
• prerequisite support

Innovation

• Heterogeneous Admission
• Localized Obligations
• Agentic Execution
• Runtime Protocol
• Dependency Preservation