A Diagnostic Framework for AI Agent Behavior
AI agents increasingly act within the same clinical, political, scientific, and social systems that behavioral scientists study. Evaluating these systems requires source-level diagnosis: the same behavioral pattern may arise from an agent representational substrate or from the roles, objectives, interaction structures, and governance rules that shape its expression. This Perspective proposes a diagnostic framework for AI agent behavior: layer attribution. The foundational computational layer defines what behaviors are possible through architecture, memory, perception, attention, and representation. The behavioral modulation layer shapes how those capacities are expressed through identity,...
| Authors | Xichen Zhang, Yingjie Zhang, Tianshu Sun |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.AI |
| Published | 19 July 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 19 July 2026 |
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