PIA: Agentic Physics-Informed Runtime Anomaly Detection

Runtime anomaly detectors for cyber-physical systems are either learned as black boxes from normal data, which miss stealthy manipulations that keep every signal inside its normal range, or derived by hand from physical models, which requires expert effort for every plant. We introduce physics-informed agents (PIA), in which a large language model agent writes the detector itself as a set of physical residuals, such as pump characteristics, tank mass balances, and controller logic, and refines every candidate against normal operating data through an evaluation workbench before deployment. The result is a compact, human-readable detector that runs in milliseconds and names the component behind each alarm. On the BATADAL water distribution attack benchmark, PIA with Claude Opus 5.5 reaches an F1 of 0.878 on the test attacks against 0.504 for the strongest of six statistical and deep baselines, keeps detecting attacks concealed by replayed and offset sensor readings, and attributes every detected test attack to the attacked component. Ablations show that testing hypotheses against data is decisive: agents that write residuals from the plant description alone lose up to 0.28 F1, whereas agents that see only anonymized signals recover most of the physical structure.