LEANGUARD: Lean-Verified Guardrails for Tool-Using Agents
Tool-using language-model agents often execute actions that their domain policies forbid. We present LeanGuard, a runtime that checks every proposed tool call against a policy written in Lean4 before the call reaches the environment. Policies combine state predicates with scoped past-time temporal operators over the execution history, evaluation is fail-closed, and the decision procedure is proved equivalent to a LeanLTL semantics. A denied call can be corrected in two ways. With feedback, the agent receives the violated rule and a hint; with proof-guided repair, Lean metaprogramming searches for a nearby call that preserves the user's intent and proves that the policy admits it, without the model. On Tau-Bench with five Qwen models (0.8B-27B), unguarded agents execute at least 33 calls that the Lean policy forbids, while LeanGuard executes none; with feedback, task success does not change significantly. On DTap, LeanGuard reduces direct prompt-injection success from 57.9% to 5.9%, and in telecom, where benign tasks need no writes, benign success is unchanged. Feedback reduces repeated blocked calls and raises task success for four of five models over a bare denial. On replayed denials, repair proves an admissible edit for 88 of 252 denials caused by argument values, in a median of 2,ms.
Authors
- Joe Stubbs (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8644-0300)
- Sreehari Sankar
- Erman Ayday (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-3383-1081)
- Debargha Ganguly (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5662-1592)
- Li Xinpeng
- Mohsen Hariri (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-0731-4275)
- Osama Zafar (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0009-0008-9621-6899)
- Alexander Nemecek (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0009-0000-2179-4186)
- Vikash Singh
- Idan Davidovich
- Biyao Zhang
- Weicong Chen
- Chaoda Song
- Shouren Wang
- Wang Yang
- Jing Ma
- Vipin Chaudhary
- Yuting Shao
- Kai Ye
- Yanyan Zhang
Publication Details
- Journal
- arXiv (Cornell University)
- Published
- 2026-11-02
- DOI
- https://doi.org/10.48550/arxiv.2611.02332
- Primary Topic
- Access Control and Trust
- Type
- preprint